94-04

THE WAY
OF HONOUR

H. CARTON DE WIART

Presented to the

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
LIBRARY

by the

ONTARIO LEGISLATIVE
LIBRARY

1980

THE WAY OF
HONOUR

THE WAY OF;f;
HONOUR

•-. .-' •'•
.»»?>*

H. CARTON DE^_WIART

BELGIAN MINISTER OF JUSTICE

LONDON : GEORGE ALLEN & UNWi
RUSK1N HOUSE 40 MUSEUM

First published in 1918

(All rights reserved)

PREFACE

THERE is nothing simpler than the position of
Belgium in the present war. Faced, on the 2nd of
August 1914 with the choice between what her own
immediate interests seemed to dictate and what
honour demanded, she did not hesitate. Since then
all that she has lost and suffered, all that she still
suffers every day, she has lost and suffered through
loyalty to her duty.

Nothing simpler. But nothing, on the other
hand, more splendid. The cause of this country
lost, upon that day, its purely national character.
To use M. Paul Deschanel's words, Belgium has
become " the pledge of International Righteousness."
How are we to conceive that peace should ever
again be mutually agreed upon by the nations of
the earth, that is to say, that treaties and agree-
ments should ever henceforth be made between
them, unless, first of all, faith in the given
word, which has been betrayed and shaken by the
flagrant violation of Belgium's rights, shall have
been restored to the world by the punishment of
that violation ?

To take an even higher standpoint, is it not certain
that the very conception of morality would be for

6 THE WAY OF HONOUR

ever damaged and falsified among men if civilized
society, whether through indifference or through
cowardice, were to allow itself to suffer a perjury
and a crime so obvious to go scathless ?

We have only to think of such consequences
to perceive what importance attaches, in so far
as Belgium's situation in the war is concerned,
to the simple things of morality and law. The
Belgian Government has grasped this fact and
has never ceased to keep these elementary con-
siderations clearly in the light, and this with a
candour and resolution which all the sophisms and
trickeries of " Kultur " have been unable to defeat.

This appeal to Law it was peculiarly the task
of that statesman who presides over King Albert's
Ministry of Justice to make, to guide and to endow
with the utmost possible clearness and force. To
no less degree, thanks to the authority which his
previous explorations of the domain of moral and
political thought had given to him, was M. Carton
de Wiart qualified to discover in the history of his
country the deeply rooted causes of that resistance
which she is to-day making, and to formulate those
reasons which make it necessary for Europe, at some
future date, to insist, as the essential condition of
her own peace and stability, upon the restoration
of Belgium to her former strength and independence.

The writings and speeches which we have brought
together in this volume possess, in this connection,
great historical value. Not, indeed, the least interest-

PREFACE 7

ing among those many matters which will occupy
the industry and thought of the historians of the
Great War will be the energy, informed alike by
wisdom and dignity, with which, in the face of the
heaviest sacrifices, both public and private, King
Albert and his assistants have succeeded in pre-
serving the national sovereignty of Belgium, in
directing the efforts of the Army, making good its
losses, and providing for all its needs, and in such
a way that every day it has become more formidable,
and this under the unceasing fire of the enemy.
Nor have they failed to guide vigilantly the diplomatic
and colonial policy of the country, while preserving
at the same time, among the seven and a half millions
of Belgians — some condemned to temporary en-
slavement by the invader, others scattered through-
out the world — a spirit of unity, endurance and faith
which has yielded neither to the length nor the
harshness of the test, neither to the craft nor the
brutality of Germany. These manoeuvres they have
known how to defeat ; they have successfully con-
fronted the campaign of lies and slanders which
everywhere the agents of Kultur have carried on ;
they have provided at once for the nourishment of
the population both in the occupied territory and in
the war zone, and have not forgotten the presence,
in foreign countries, of hundreds of thousands
of refugees, many of whom have been stripped of
all that they possessed. Nor have they failed to
study the question of the restoration of the country,

8 THE WAY OF HONOUR

to-day despoiled and covered with ruins, to which
all these refugees will be anxious instantly to return,
and to prepare the means of that restoration. What
problems — legal, administrative, financial and eco-
nomic— are here awaiting solution, whose very
existence the ordinary man does not so much as
suspect !

In the volume which we publish to-day a great
number of these problems are considered. It will
help to show how thoroughly Belgium, who earned
the utmost esteem of the nations by her sacrifice
of everything, when the German ultimatum was
delivered, to her passion for her honour and her
pledged word, has shown herself worthy to retain
that esteem in the future by the moderation and
courage with which she has endured the most terrible
and extraordinary storm which has ever, without
question, burst upon and overturned the existence
of a modern people.

THE PUBLISHERS
OF THE FRENCH EDITION.

CONTENTS

PAGE
PREFACE ........ 5

I. THE AGGRESSION

THE WAY OF HONOUR . . . . . .II

THE BARBARIAN IN BELGIUM . . . . . l8

METHODS OF WAR AND PROPAGANDA . . . .30

II. THE ARMY

THE BELGIAN SOLDIER . . . ... -47

THE NATIONAL FETE AT THE FRONT . . . .59

LIEGE AND THE YSER . . . . . .65

TO THE VICTIMS OF DUTY . . , . -74

III. THE PEOPLE

THE ENDURANCE OF THE BELGIAN PEOPLE . . . 8 1

THE DUTIES OF EXILE . . . . . .99

ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE TRENCHES . . . 12O

UNION AROUND THE KING ..... 132

io CONTENTS

IV. THE FUNDAMENTAL CAUSES OF
BELGIUM'S RESISTANCE

PAGE
THE PERMANENCE OF BELGIAN NATIONALITY . . . 147

THE MILITARY TRADITIONS OF THE BELGIANS . . .159

THE ROOTS OF OUR NATIONALITY .... l66

THE LIBERTY OF NATIONS . . l8o

V. SIGHTS AND LESSONS OF THE WAR

WITH THE FRENCH ARMY . . . . . 1 86

AMERICAN SYMPATHY . . . . . . IQ7

THE MORAL TEACHING OF THE WAR .... 204

BOOKS AND THE WAR ...... 229

SOLDIER POETS ....... 24!

FAREWELL TO EMILE VERHAEREN .... 250

I

THE AGGRESSION

THE WAY OF HONOUR

ON the 20th of December 1914, the Belgian Flag
Day, the City of Paris formally received the
Belgian Government at the Hotel de Ville.
There were present :

MM. RENE VIVIANI, President of the Council ;
ARISTIDE BRIAND, Minister of Justice and

Vice President of the Council ;
DELCASSE, Minister for Foreign Affairs ;
STEPHEN PICHON, formerly Minister for
Foreign Affairs and President of the Franco-
Belgian Committee ;
BARON GUILLAUME, Envoy Extraordinary

and Minister Plenipotentiary of Belgium ;
BARON BEYENS, formerly Minister Pleni-
potentiary of Belgium at Berlin ;
General GALOPIN, representing the Military

Governor of Paris ;

HENNION, formerly Prefect of Police, Com-
missary General for the French Government
to the Belgian Government ;
Me HENRI-ROBERT, President of the Order of

Advocates ;

The Senators and Deputies for the Department of the
Seine, the Deputies for Havre, several Senators,
Deputies and Communal Councillors of Belgium.

12 THE WAY OF HONOUR

Addresses of welcome were made by M. Adrien
Mithouard, President of the Municipal Council
of Paris, M. Delaney, Prefect of the Department
of the Seine, M. E. Laurent, Prefect of Police,
and M. Pierre Cherest, President of the General
Council of the Department of the Seine. M.
Carton de Wiart replied as follows :

In the name of the Belgian Government, in the
name of all my fellow-countrymen and above all those
who, over yonder, in our ruined and bleeding country,
are striving against the power of the aggressor, I
thank you, gentlemen, both Presidents and Prefects,
for your words of good cheer. I thank you all for
the reception which you have given to those words.

Truly, in those words and their reception we
recognize a part of a boundless and delicate hospi-
tality extended to us daily, and I ask your per-
mission to refer only to one thing — the affirmation
of the never-failing friendship which unites Belgium
to France.

But a little while ago, in the days of peace, we often
spoke of that friendship.

But to-day, how far sweeter is that friendship !
How we regard it to-day ! How freely it proclaims
itself ! How it lives ! This it is which in the heart
of Paris, and at the same moment in every commune
of France, unites our flags and our love for our
countries. This it is which in our plains by the
Yser, among the bursting shell and shrapnel, fills

THE AGGRESSION 13

with irresistible energy those who bear arms in one
cause, whose hearts beat to the impulse of one hope.

An historian of ancient times has defined friendship
very acutely : "To wish for the same things together,
to hate together and to repudiate the same things —
this," he says, " is true friendship."

And that which we wish, as do you — the single
ambition to which our international policy, like
your own, has the desire and the right to pretend,
is — to be honest men.

Yes, honest men, bondsmen of their word and
signature, faithful to that ideal which France has
always worshipped and which we understand even
as does she, for which we fight without rest and will
suffer without a murmur ; that ideal which is known
by one word, not to be translated into German —
Honour !

From the year 1831 Belgium maintained her
prosperous existence under a special statute which
was indeed the very condition of her independence.
By the most solemn treaties the Powers had under-
taken, with us and with one another, to respect our
neutrality — nay more, to guarantee it.

Yet suddenly, on Sunday the 2nd of August, at
seven o'clock in the evening, one of these Powers
addressed Belgium in the following terms :

" Let my armies pass, that I may the more quickly
attack my rival and take him by surprise. Agree,
and you will have nothing to regret. Refuse, and
I will treat you as my foe ! "

14 THE WAY OF HONOUR

Why should I not say it ? In this crucial moment
we were confronted with a tragic vision — this fair
land, whose smiling prosperity was our pride, invaded
in spite of a useless resistance and ravaged by hordes
without number.

But to yield passage to one of the co-signatories
of our treaties, let him be who he might, not to do
everything — yes, everything — to oppose him, this
would have been to betray our other guarantors. It
would have been to break our promise. No Belgian
dreamed of it.

And to-day, after so many atrocities endured,
after all the pillage and the burnings, after the
massacre of so many innocent folk, the loss of so
much wealth, the ruin of so much that is fair — for
they have martyrized the living and the dead, not
only men but the very stones — in spite of our de-
vastated towns, our ravaged fields, our mourning
people, wandering through the remnants of their
homes or turned adrift upon the roads — who, after
all, among these victims would exchange his misery
for the spoils of that brigandage ?

An English artist, Bernard Partridge, has shown
us, in a drawing already famous, the Emperor of
Germany standing beside our King Albert.

The Kaiser, with a sinister smile, points to the
corpses and ruins that lie heaped over the soil of
Belgium, and whispers in his ear : " So, you see,
you've lost everything ! "

And our young King, to whom the honour of all

THE AGGRESSION 15

his people has been entrusted, answers simply, as he
draws himself up proudly and rests his weight upon
his sword as it were upon his honour : " Not my
soul ! "

In our place, you would have spoken and acted
as we did.

At one in our conception of honour, we under-
stand and admire one another — do wre not ? — in
the measure of all that our consciences scorn and
condemn.

We have watched in the Universities of Germany,
like some monstrous and poisonous flower, a new
doctrine come to life and flourish — Weltpolitik.
So is named that hypertrophy of Prussian nationalism
which Denies all that hinders it and swallows up all
that it desires.

For its promises, agreements, contracts — that is
to say, all that makes society, for nations as for
individuals, possible — become, from the moment
when they begin to be inconvenient, nothing but
scraps of paper.

At the sweet will of its crazy pride, it crushes
bodies and souls, it perverts, corrupts, terrorizes,
starves, traduces.

In its pedantry it has decided that small States
are nothing but miserable and contemptible institu-
tions and that they are fated inevitably to be absorbed
by the great.

Only a few days ago Nansen, in the presence of
the King of Norway, protested eloquently against

16 THE WAY OF HONOUR

this rapacious doctrine and showed what Holland,
Switzerland, Denmark and yet other States had,
with us, to fear from it.

It is this very theory which the policy of the French
Republic denies when it admits for every nationality,
which has earned the right to live by the part which
it has played in the civilization of the world, an
indefeasible right to live according to its own desires.

Was it not one of the fathers of the Republic,
was it not Thiers, who, already advancing this theory,
added that in the Society of Nations the small
States always represent the cause of right, since
they are always on the side of the weak ?

And so, every nation which desires to live and to
remain herself knows henceforward where he. trust
is to be placed ; and if, on the one hand, in Belgium,
it is force which makes right, on the other hand,
here it is right and union in the right which make
force.

Now, note with how clear and pure an atmosphere
this double sentiment — the worship of honour and
respect for one's fellow-man — envelops the action
of the Allies ; the air which one breathes here is, as
it were, saturated with honour. Here words find
again their true meaning and are freed from Teutonic
sophism. Wait awhile, and you shall see the neutral
countries learn here to understand that duty which
to-day confronts them, that duty of which one of the
masters of International Law, M. Louis Renault,
reminded them the other day, when he told them

THE AGGRESSION 17

that in the face of a definite violation of law,
shameless and acknowledged, like this of Belgium's
neutrality, it will not do for the other Governments
— to-day witnesses, to-morrow, perhaps, victims — to
shut themselves up behind an official indifference and
to tolerate, if only by their silence, the flouting of
regulations which they themselves have adopted.

For us this atmosphere of candour is charged and
enlivened also by the brilliance of the historic virtues
of France ; and these have never shone more gloriously.
And is it not, I ask you, this very brilliance which
to-day upholds and cheers our own dear Belgian
flag and, across the scarlet of our blood and the
blackness of our ruins, casts so bright a gleam
of gold ?

Ah ! dear flag, the symbol of the ancient unity
of our provinces, both Flemish and Walloon, how
proud of it we are, and how we thank you for the
salute with which you have honoured it !

In 1789 it was first unfurled, after the Braban$on
Revolution, when we raised it against the oppression
of Austria. In 1830 it reappeared in the triumph
of our independence. In August 1914, at the frontier,
it confronted perjury and aggression, and its is
the honour of having shattered the first onslaught
of the Barbarian.

To-day, you embrace it in the name of France
and of Paris.

To-morrow, our belfries and our clock-towers —
in Bruges and Antwerp and Malines and Brussels and

2

i8 THE WAY OF HONOUR

Louvain and Liege — widowed to-day awhile and
mourning their lost flags, will celebrate its return.
With what transports of delight will they see it
come, safeguarded by the glorious flags of England
and France. And the sight shall heal these old
towers of their wounds.

In that same hour we shall acclaim, not far away,
an Alsace-Lorraine that has been won back to
France ; on the banks of the Vistula, thanks to the
noble decision of the Tzar, a restored Poland ; and
throughout a healthier Europe, whence a great
breeze of moral sanity shall have swept away for
ever all the miasmas of Weltpolitik, every small State
shall flourish untroubled within the frontiers which
its legitimate aspirations shall assign.

And on that day — I say it without hesitation —
there will not be found throughout the world a single
honest heart that will not beat more strongly for
the unity of immortal France and will not rejoice
with her in the vindication of the Right and the
triumph of Civilization.

THE BARBARIAN IN BELGIUM1

MY DEAR FRIEND,

This book, wherein you have so truthfully por-
trayed the crimes of which Germany has been guilty

1 Introduction to Les Barbares en Belgique, by Pierre
Nothomb (Paris, Perrin & Co.).

THE AGGRESSION 19

upon our soil, is one long shudder. In writing it
you have performed a task at once of piety and of
vengeance, of a son's love for Belgium, of righteous
wrath against her oppressor.

It is not enough that an official Commission of
Enquiry, whose labours, as cautious as they are
authoritative, have now for six months been pro-
ceeding, should record by its evidence and its reports
the unanswerable proofs of Germany's scorn both for
her most sacred promises and for the regulations of
war, for international probity and for the common
rights of Humanity — in a word, for everything upon
and out of which Civilization is founded and built.

Of the proofs thus obtained, a synthesis was re-
quired. Out of all these crimes the principle from
which they sprang had to be extracted. Above all,
for the glory of the victims and the shame of the
butchers, it was necessary that these crimes should
be denounced, not merely before the Chancelleries
of the world, but in the hearing of the great mass of
mankind, and that they should be stigmatized as
they deserved. This it is which you have proposed
to yourself to do. This it is which you have done.
I only hope that other writers, as sincere and coura-
geous as yourself, will be fired by this example, so
that there may no longer, in any country of the world,
be one man worthy of the name who, through his
ignorance, shall remain indifferent to a cause wherein
the solidarity of the entire human race is concerned.
Yes, it is necessary that our dear land, who has been

20 THE WAY OF HONOUR

crucified for her devotion to duty, should proclaim
the truth aloud, not so much to solicit compassion
as to vindicate the Right.

The Right ! At the mere sound of this word it
is to me as if amongst us there arose the voice of
bitter protest and here and there of sarcasm.

" The Right ! " say those simple men whose homes
have been destroyed, whose families have vanished
into the tempest, and who to-day witness the insolent
occupation of our towns and villages. " The Right !
What a snare ! What a mockery ! "

" What ! A Great Power who, in agreement with
the others, had first of all insisted that Belgium should
remain perpetually neutral, now suddenly demanded
that we should violate that neutrality for her benefit
and against the interests of her co-signatories. She
had assumed the duty of guaranteeing us. And
then, shamelessly, she sprang at our throat. Can
History point to a perjury more flagrant ? Not
without cynicism did the German Empire, through
its Chancellor in the Reichstag, admit it on the
4th of August 1914. And in the face of such an
infamy, what was done, what was said by the
forty-two States who solemnly subscribed their
names to Article I of one of their Hague Con-
ventions : ' The territory of neutral Powers is
inviolable ' ?

"It is not," add those simple men, "it is not

THE AGGRESSION 21

merely that Justice has been outraged openly and with
impunity. An agreement had also, at The Hague,
been entered into by these States under the title
' Laws and Customs of Warfare upon Land/ and
this set forth certain imperative rules as the strict
minimum of what respect for human life and property
imposes upon belligerents. Well, of all these regula-
tions there is not one — no, not one — whose breach
by Germany has not been established beyond question.
Scarcely had their armies forced our frontier than
they delivered themselves over to pillage, massacre
and rape. Their proclamations, signed by their
military and civilian chiefs, systematized the infliction
of atrocious collective punishments. By thousands,
non-combatants — and among these priests, old men,
women and children — were shot and tortured. By
thousands others were deported into Prussia. With-
out any strategic reason, open towns were bombarded.
World-famous churches, charitable and scientific
institutions, miracles of art, were blotted out. Theft
was organized wholesale, like a business. It was
no longer war, no more than an assassination is a
duel. It was a frightful heaping up of crimes against
the rights of humanity and of bloody atrocities.
And in face of these crimes, what was said, what
was done, by all those States, the result of whose
painstaking labours was thus made a mockery ?
Where is the official voice that was raised in protest ?
International Law, Rules of War, National Rights
— what then is the good of these fine words, unless

22 THE WAY OF HONOUR

it be to dupe the weak and to allow the strong
to invoke them whensoever they see their own
advantage in so doing ? "

Such things are in the thoughts and on the lips
of many of these victims who have suffered so much.
They do not complain. They hold back their tears.
But at least, in their bitter suffering, they ask that
no longer before their eyes, for their consolation,
there shall be spread all this deceitful wealth of
humanitarian phrases and international conventions,
empty pretences all or sham screens, behind which
they perceive the ineradicable carelessness, selfishness
and cowardice of men and nations alike.

But no ! We must not accept, we may not tolerate
such talk. Upon the day when these blasphemies
get the better of our faith in the immanent Justice
of God, upon that day, but on that day only, we shall
be conquered. Right up to the end — that is to say
until our definite victory has been won — our legiti-
mate defence must rest, and shall always rest, at
once upon our arms and upon Justice.

International Law, doubtless, is, against the
abuses of a brutal force, a means of defence whose
immediate value we would do well not to exaggerate.
But it would be still less wise for us, on our part, to
underestimate its importance. Let others display
an unenviable courage in ranking among " scraps of
paper " the solemn treaties which nations make the

THE AGGRESSION 23

one with the other. We will never cease to proclaim
the principles of the Eternal Morality. It is upon
the battlefield of the human conscience, and not
only through the mouths of cannon and at the
bayonet's point, that the fate of nations is decided.
Frightful though the spectacle be which the world
to-day affords, Humanity has not ceased to be
human. The night has swallowed us up. But,
however deep the gloom may be which surrounds
us, " somewhere it is always morning," as Longfellow
says. And does not the glow of dawn already
brighten our horizon ? The more widely it is known,
the more closely will our cause attract to itself the
sympathy of all honest hearts. In his Pastoral
Letter, already historical, has not Cardinal Mercier
been able to announce that our little Belgium has
won the highest place in the admiration of the people
of the earth ?

Is it necessary to look for proof of this among our
Allies, whose Governments have so loyally stood by
the promises they made to us in 1839, whose armies
are to-day fighting, side by side with our own soldiers,
on that soil of Belgium which one day we are to
free with their help, and whose inhabitants are
receiving our refugees with so warm and kindly a
greeting ?

Let us rather listen to those indignant and authori-
tative voices which, in the neutral countries, are
rising in our defence. Since the month of September
1914, in the United States, we have known that the

24 THE WAY OF HONOUR

deep-seated righteousness of the great American
people has thrilled in unison with our Belgian hearts.
But a few weeks ago, the statesman who so brilliantly
guided the destinies of America and at whose sug-
gestion the Conference of 1907 met — Theodore
Roosevelt — reminded the world of the abuses which
that Conference forbade, and added : " All these
offences have been committed by Germany, and her
treatment of Belgium is the gravest of international
crimes." And, replying to those who see in these
Conventions nothing but empty phrases, he says :
" Had I for one moment imagined that to sign these
Conventions of The Hague meant nothing more than
the expression of a pious hope at which each Power
was free to scoff with impunity, should its interests
so demand, I should assuredly never have allowed
us to take any part in so mischievous a farce."
Another great citizen of the Union, Dr. Charles W.
Eliot, Emeritus Professor of Harvard University,
has, in his turn, done me the honour to express to
me " the profound sympathy of cultured Americans
for suffering Belgium and their horror at the methods
by which the Germans to-day carry on war."

In Switzerland, at the opening of the session of
the Federal Chambers last December, the doyen
of the National Council, M. Henri Fazy, did not
hesitate to pronounce the strong protest of a small,
but, like ours, a loyal and proud people, against
this unquestionable violation of Right, this contempt
of the claims of honour and of Humanity.

THE AGGRESSION 25

Among our neighbours and friends in Holland,
where by hundreds of thousands Belgians in flight
from their ruined homes are meeting to-day with
a frank and generous hospitality, the men of science
are in revolt against the Manifesto of their colleagues
in the German Universities. " Among them," cries
Kernkamp, an Amsterdam Professor, " there is not
to be found a single one capable of expressing a
sentiment, ever so remotely chivalrous, for the
unfortunate Belgians and their Government who
have so boldly resisted the demands of Germany.
The Belgians are the only people who can justly
speak of a war which has been forced upon them.
They might have preserved their lives and property
in safety, had they been sufficiently base to raise
no opposition to the passage of Germany. They
were not guilty of that baseness. This is the sole
reproach which the Germans can level at them."

Personally, I confess that, when I read the Mani-
festo of the German professors, I imagined at first
that it was some parody, or one of those rather
heavily ironical " accusations," the lure of which
the Anglo-Saxon humorist does not always know
how to resist, and wherein Mark Twain and
Chesterton have excelled. In this parody I found
cause for regret in the too violent exaggeration
with which its authors had represented the
cumbersome audacity of German pedantry.

Let us, if you will, recall this catalogue of mon-
strosities. "It is not true that we have criminally

26 THE WAY OF HONOUR

violated the neutrality of Belgium." " It is not true
that our soldiers have attacked either the life or
the property of a single Belgian citizen, save where
they have been forced so to do by the hard necessity
of legitimate defence/' "It is not true that our
troops have savagely destroyed Lou vain." "It is
not true that we make war in defiance of Inter-
national Law." No. The parody went, in truth,
beyond the limits which are permitted to this
species of puzzle. And I felt a sort of shame for
those who had invented this absurdity, when I
found that they had adorned the foot of this litany
of preposterous denials with the names of several
scientists with whom I had the honour to be ac-
quainted, and for whom I cherished the most sincere
respect, such as Herren Lamprecht, Wundt or
von Liszt.

Since then I have been assured upon unimpeachable
authority that the document was genuine, and that
the humorists of England or America had in no
way contributed to its production. I could only
rejoice for the reputation of those gentlemen : but
for that of the German Professors I can only weep.

But if it is so, how are we to explain this
blundering performance ?

Were these signatures collected by one or another
of those methods which German culture has em-
ployed amongst us towards peasants who have
shown themselves not too eager to serve as guides
to the Death's Head Hussars, or towards bankers

THE AGGRESSION 27

who did not open their strong rooms with sufficient
alacrity ? Or perhaps the official documents upon
which these learned gentlemen have founded their
denials may have been lacking in one or other of
those strict conditions which the most modern
historical criticism demands ? We need not hesitate
to give these intellectuals the benefit of one or
other of these charitable suppositions, since we are
able to appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober.
Their intoxication at an end, they must have made
the acquaintance of the official reports and read books
like this ; and now, if they persist in their audacious
denial of those infamies to which our ruins, where
the flames have hardly ceased to blaze, our graves,
whereon the earth lies fresh, bear witness, if they
are prepared to find excuses for so many infamies
and cover them with the mantle of their Weltpolitik ?
by what names, I ask, are we to brand them ?

How may they still without blushing encounter
the eye of an honourable man ?

How may each one of them remain face to face
with a conscience that is burdened by so heavy a

shame ?

* * *

The day when the tempest broke upon us surprised
you, my dear friend, like so many others, in the
midst of your own home life and the joys of your
own peaceful work. Those who have read your
beautiful poems, so pure in their inspiration and
their form, could easily picture for themselves the

28 THE WAY OF HONOUR

ivory tower wherein your saintly soul had made
her refuge. Immediately, leaving behind you your
young family, abandoning your growing fame, you
took up your weapons, and in the ranks of the Brussels
Guard you went out valiantly to war. Beneath
the spectacle of the land, the glow of fires, the vision
of ruin and slaughter, your poet's soul became filled
with all the sorrows of our human brotherhood,
and your heart was oppressed by its desire for justice.
Then you remembered that the pen is also a weapon.
And with the pen of eloquence and sincerity, inspired
by none but the most certain evidence, you have
expressed for us the deep misery of this Belgian
people which stands to-day in the eyes of the world
as the living personification of all that is noblest and,
let them say what they will, strongest — the Right.
It is to serve your country still, thus to proclaim
her sorrows and her hopes. It is to make yourself
yet worthier of the name you bear, a name that
is so closely associated with the history of our

independence.

* * *

In one of those confidences wherein his whole
philosophy betrays itself, Bismarck does not fear
to raise the destruction of property and the massacre
of civilians to the dignity of rules of war, in order,
as he says, " to bring the ruined and decimated
population to a frame of mind which shall cause them
to beg for peace and submit quietly to the conditions
of the conqueror." The theory is detestable. Nay,

THE AGGRESSION 29

more, it is false. In so far as we alone are concerned,
our history is enough to prove that the Belgians have
never allowed themselves to be crushed by such an
ordeal and have never yielded to its accomplishment.

You know, doubtless, in the old museum at Namur,
which stands so charmingly at the Grognon Gate,
where the Sambre and the Meuse come together,
that mysterious memorial monument which has
come down to us from our eager and tumultuous
fifteenth century. It represents, cut in granite, a
body without a head : a knight, clad in armour, his
hands crossed upon his breast in the manner of a
priest. No name, no coat of arms, no date. Only, on
the stone, one reads this legend in Gothic letters :
" The hour will come that shall pay for everything."

This hour will come for us too ; we know it ; we
desire it. All our thoughts and energies centre to-day
around our King upon the battlefields of Flanders.
Sad and shaken though we be, we remain filled with
hope in the Eternal Justice, with confidence that
the necessary reparation will be made. It may be
long. No matter ! We are victims, but victims
whom an honourable pride supports. The hour
will come that shall pay for everything. And then,
what joy will be ours ! Aided by our young genera-
tions, whom duty, heroically assumed, shall have
matured, whom the flame of battles shall have tested,
we shall rebuild — shall we not ? — a new life for our-
selves, a new Belgium, fairer still than the old one.

HAVRE, February i, 1915.

3o THE WAY OF HONOUR

METHODS OF WAR AND PROPAGANDA

ON the 7th of August 1914, upon the reports of the
excesses which the German troops had been com-
mitting from the moment of their entry into Belgium,
the Belgian Government appointed an official Com-
mission which was entrusted with the task of
collecting, analysing and examining, in the most
impartial and careful way, all the facts brought
under its notice which might appear to be violations
of the rules of International Law and of the rules
and customs of war.

This Commission was composed of experienced
and cautious men — their very reputation constitutes
a most valuable guarantee — and sat first in Antwerp,
then in Havre and London, where a number of
delegates, under the chairmanship of Sir Mackenzie
Chalmers, undertook the work of collecting and
examining the evidence of numerous witnesses who
had taken refuge in England.

At Brussels the Commission was presided over by
M. van Iseghem, President of the Cour de Cassation ;
at Antwerp and Havre by M. Cooreman, Minister
of State and formerly President of the Chamber
of Deputies.

This conscientious investigation was summed up
in twenty-two reports which have been published
in various languages.1 No refutation of any

1 Berger-Levrault, Publishers, Nancy.

THE AGGRESSION 31

definite nature or supported by any proof has up
to the present appeared by which the conclusions
therein stated might be weakened. On the contrary,
the Governments of France and Great Britain having,
in pursuance of the example set them by the Belgian
Government, themselves organized official Com-
missions of Enquiry, under the presidency, in the
first case, of M. Payelle, President of the Cour des
Comptes of France, and in the other of Lord Bryce,
formerly Ambassador of Great Britain at Washing-
ton, obtained confirmation and further definition of
many revelations which the Belgian enquiry had
collected.

These official documents have, again, been amplified
by private publications which have appeared in
various countries.

It is true that not all these stories which the war
has set afloat are to be given an equal measure of
belief. Any one who has any experience of the
weakness of human evidence must begin by placing
himself on guard against the confusion, the forget-
fulness, the mistakes and the falsehoods which may
impair or blot out the recollection of a witness.
Depositions are worth nothing more than the value
of their maker's honesty and the accuracy of his
memory, the exactness of his observation, and the
power which is his of silencing, with the single object
of arriving at the truth, the voice of his passions,
which itself is capable of inspiring him with resent-
ment, enthusiasm, self-interest, or the mere desire
to put himself forward.

32 THE WAY OF HONOUR

But to consider among these publications only
those of which the authors, by earlier work of theirs,
or by previous proof of their prudence and honesty,
can give serious evidence of sincerity, it is easy
to-day to arrive at a definite opinion with regard
to the conduct in Belgium of the German authorities
and the German soldiers.

The value of so much evidence, accompanied by
the dates, names and other simply verified particulars,
is, again, strangely increased by the refusal of the
German authorities to submit them to any authorized
Court of Enquiry or Arbitration.

Already the Belgian Commission has announced
that it is ready to submit the result of its labours to
an International Commission of Enquiry composed
of delegates from the non-belligerent countries.

"It is proper to observe," says its twelfth Report,
in conclusion, " that the facts upon which our con-
clusions are based have been sworn to by honourable
witnesses, who have seen with their own eyes and
have signed their depositions. As many of them
are living in territory still occupied by the invader,
it is to be understood that we must not prematurely
publish their names. But we do not fear, nay, with
all our force we demand, the formation of an Inter-
national Commission which will undertake our
enquiry afresh and upon a broader basis, and will
offer to those who shall give evidence before it
guarantees of personal security."

The Belgian bishops, too, who have, with a courage

THE AGGRESSION 33

truly apostolic, on many occasions denounced to
the German authorities, both civil and military, the
abominations which have desolated and are still
desolating their dioceses, have offered to make these
same accusations, should they be contested, before
an Arbitration Tribunal. Cardinal Mercier, in his
letters of the 24th of January 1915 and the loth of
February 1915, and Monseigneur Heylen, Bishop of
Namur, in his letter of the I2th of April 1915, have
begged that a tribunal be appointed composed of
arbitrators, both German and Belgian, in equal
numbers, and should have for its president some
person nominated by a neutral State. Following
out this idea, the admirable manifesto which, on
the 24th of November 1915, was addressed by
all the bishops of Belgium to the bishops of
Germany, offered to submit the exactitude of the
Belgian assertions and protests to a court of
ecclesiastics.

An attempt of the same kind was made, during
the month of January 1915, in the name of Free-
masonry, by M. Charles Magnetic, Senator for
Liege and Grand Master of the Belgian Lodges.

After stating to the Freemasons of Germany
that " it would be of the highest utility to examine
into the circumstances in which the horrors which
all civilized men deplore were perpetrated/' M.
Charles Magnette added :

" And now I would ask you to agree with me
to appoint a Commission of Enquiry which shall

3

34 THE WAY OF HONOUR

travel through the districts where the war has
passed, and where it is now being carried on, and
which shall prepare a report of its findings after
possessing itself of all the information which may
be of service. This Commission would be com-
posed of delegates from the Grand Lodges of the
neutral countries ; for instance, a Dutch brother,
a Swiss, and an Italian, and naturally it would
contain a German Mason and a Belgian."

If these proposals have met with no response, it
is because the German authorities know very well
that they could expect, from any tribunal worthy
of the name, nothing but the confirmation of the
formidable indictment which has been raised against
them by the accusing voices of so many victims and
witnesses of their crimes. No new examination of
those crimes, no public arguments of which they
could be the subject, could fail to awake the attention
and arouse the indignation of the neutral countries.
The sole desire, the sole hope of Germany, is that
forgetfulness may obscure her enormities, and that
presently the dust of time, heaped up through all
the ruin and convulsion by which humanity is over-
taken to-day, shall succeed in covering with a species
of prescription or amnesty all the mud, ashes and
blood of which she has been the author.

But this calculation of hers will be baffled.
The Universal Conscience and History will not lend
themselves to its furtherance. No matter how
great may be the -selfishness and carelessness of

THE AGGRESSION 35

nations and men, there exists, deep down in each
of us, a desire for justice which cannot be extirpated.
Every attempt to stifle it only increases its force
and its driving power. And never will this desire
for justice suffer Force and Cynicism to usurp the
name of Right. Never shall Lady Macbeth wash
away the spot of blood which denounces her crime

to the world.

* * *

" The originality of the German atrocities in this
war," says M. Jean Cruppi, former!}7 Minister of
Justice for France, " is not to be found in their
motive, nor in the barbarity of their performance,
but rather in the systematic efforts which their
authors have made to unite their crimes with
a scientific conception of the state of war."

This is a very just observation. We find our-
selves in the presence of a methodical barbarism
which takes itself for a form of civilization and
pushes its excursions into paradox to limits which
the mind of man has never hitherto imagined.

The theory of the German General Staff may
be reduced to this single principle : Everything is
permissible which can assure our military triumph.
We are only concerned with the rights of others
in so far as those may lead to some counter-stroke
dangerous to Germany's interests.

Immediately after the Hague Conferences, at
which the representatives of the Powers had with
great difficulty come to some agreement regarding

36 THE WAY OF HONOUR

the introduction of certain regulations among the
usages of war, the German General Staff, fearing
no doubt lest some of its simple soldiers should be
inclined to take seriously these Conventions to which
Germany had put her name, published a Manual
of the Rules of Continental War (Kriegsbrauch im
Landkriege) which became part of the portable
library of every German officer. The theory of
this Manual is summed up in the following formula :

" Humanitarian claims, such as the sparing of
men and property, can only come into play in so
far as the nature and object of the war allow."

For those whom humanitarian scruples and the
simple respect of the given word might check, the
Manual adds :

" Nineteenth century thought was essentially
swayed by humanitarian considerations which often
degenerated into sentimentality. There have been
not a few attempts to remodel the development of
the customs of war in a sense absolutely at variance
with the nature of war and its objects. In the future
there will certainly be many more such endeavours,
especially as these efforts have already found moral
recognition in the Convention of Geneva and the
Conferences of Brussels and of The Hague.

" But take care," adds the Manual. " The officer
is himself the child of his times ; he is carried along
by the currents of thought which agitate his country,
and this so much the more because he is an educated
person. There is then danger that he may arrive

THE AGGRESSION 37

at quite false conceptions with regard to the true
object of war. Only by a thorough study of military
history will he be secured from exaggerated ideas
of humanity, and will understand that war neces-
sarily entails certain cruelties and, still more, that
the only genuine humanity is often to be found in
the ruthless practice of these severities."

It is in this conception, expounded and developed
with a pedantry and cynicism the measure of which
has been given to us by the writings of Treitschke,
Bernhardi and Harden, that we must seek for the
explanation of so many of the crimes that have been
perpetrated by Germany in the course of the present
war, from the violation of Belgian neutrality — and
this remains the most flagrant and atrocious of all —
down to the massacre of civilians, that simple appli-
cation of the principle of collective punishment.

' This principle " — so writes coldly Dr. Walter
Bloem in the Cologne Gazette of the loth of February
1915 — " finds its justification in the theory of terror-
ization (Abschreckung). The innocent suffer along
with the guilty and, if the latter cannot be found, in
their place. This punishment is not inflicted because
a crime has been committed, but in order that
crimes may not be committed. Every burning of
a village, every execution of hostages, every suppres-
sion of a part of the population of a commune whose
people have taken up arms against the troops which
appear among them — all these things are far less
in the nature of acts of vengeance than they are

38 THE WAY OF HONOUR

warnings addressed to the territory which has not
yet been occupied.

" And this is not to be questioned. It is truly
as warnings that the burnings of Battice, Herve,
Louvain, Dinant served. The incendiarism and
bloodshed of the beginning of the campaign saved
the great towns of Belgium from the temptation
to attack the weak garrisons with which alone we
were able to occupy them. Is there a man alive
who imagines that the Belgian capital would have
tolerated our presence — and to-day \ve move about
in Brussels as in our own country — had not that
capital trembled, did it not tremble still, in its fear
of our vengeance ?

" War is not a society pastime. It is fire of hell.
He who touches it with his finger burns his hand
and soul and loses his life. It is of such a fate that
the poor Belgian people, blinded and led astray,
has become the victim."

And applying these theories to the Eastern theatre
of war, Field-Marshal von Hindenburg, w7hom the
Germans regard as the first of their generals, replies
to an interviewer of the Neue Freie Presse :

" The land suffers. Lodz is famished. It is
regrettable, but it is right. War is not made senti-
mentally. The more pitilessly it is carried on the
more it is humane, at bottom, for it the more quickly
comes to an end. Those methods of war which
bring peace most rapidly are and remain the most
humane methods."

THE AGGRESSION 39

There, in all its nakedness, is the whole of German
mentality. It is this which is at stake in the
monstrous conflict which to-day is tearing the world
to pieces. The true question to be decided by this
immense war is not so much whether the principle of
nationality shall triumph over that of imperialism,
nor whether autocracy shall carry the day against
popular liberty. We are concerned to decide which
philosophy is henceforth to prevail in the education
of nations and individuals : whether it is to be the
old morality of Christendom, to the development of
which twenty centuries of civilization have contri-
buted and which teaches at once respect for the
person and property of others and belief in the
given word, or else the " Kultur " of Prussia, for
which there exists no check upon selfishness nor
any appeal to justice against force.

Intoxicated though she may be by the poison of
these theories, Germany is nevertheless too well
informed with regard to international opinion, by
the swarms of agents which she maintains in every
country of the world, not to understand that the
doctrines of her General Staff are not particularly
acceptable abroad, and that the monstrous obstinacy
which she favours has proved for the most part indi-
gestible for the weaker psychologies of Europe and
America, still but little accustomed to a diet of
Kultur. In the same way that her commerce prides

40 THE WAY OF HONOUR

itself on accommodating its most insignificant pro-
ducts to the taste of the foreign consumer, her
propaganda has not hesitated to adapt itself to
the mentalities which it proposes to educate. The
reports of the massacres and incendiarism committed
by the German troops were of a nature to arouse
the indignation and sympathy of the New World.
What could be more simple, then, than a solemn
manifesto, signed by ninety-three German scientists,
and projected across the ocean, to deny with the
utmost effrontery both massacres and burnings ?
Let us recall its terms.

"It is not true that we have criminally violated
the neutrality of Belgium.

"It is not true that our soldiers have attacked
the life and property of a single Belgian citizen, save
where they have been compelled to do so by the
harsh necessities of legitimate defence.

"It is not true that our troops have brutally
destroyed Louvain.

"It is not true that we have made war regardless
of International Law. Our soldiers have committed
neither acts of indiscipline nor acts of cruelty."

But not for long could such denials avail against
the evidence of innumerable barbarities. No matter.
By an audacious perversion of the facts, the victims
can be made to bear the responsibility for acts of
repression which their own conduct has made
necessary !
When, on the nth of September 1914, the Belgian

THE AGGRESSION 41

Mission appointed by His Majesty the King of the
Belgians to visit the President of the United States,
and over which I had the honour to preside, reached
New York, it was with no small astonishment that
it learned that, two days earlier, the German Emperor,
anxious to anticipate the effect of the documents and
protests which the Mission was to bring to the notice
of the great American Republic, had cabled to Mr.
Wilson a personal message in which, after accusing
the French Army of having employed bullets " the
use of which is forbidden by the accepted principles
of International Law," he added : "I make there-
fore a solemn protest against such a way of making
war, which has become, thanks to the methods of
our adversaries, one of the most barbarous in history.
Not only have they themselves employed this cruel
device, but the Belgian Government has openly
encouraged the civil population to take part in this
war, for which it has long and carefully prepared.
The cruelties practised in the course of this guerrilla
warfare by women and even by priests against our
wounded soldiers, our doctors and our nurses (doctors
have been killed and hospitals have been shelled)
have been such that my generals have at last been
compelled to adopt the most rigorous means in
order to punish the offenders and to prevent a savage
population from continuing these criminal and de-
testable acts. Several villages and even the town
of Louvain have had to be destroyed (except the
beautiful Hotel de Ville) in the interests of our own

42 THE WAY OF HONOUR

safety and the protection of my troops. My heart
bleeds when I recognize that such measures have
been rendered inevitable, and when I think of the
countless innocent people who have lost their homes
and their goods by reason of the misdeeds of such
criminals. — WILHELM, I.R."

My colleagues and I had come directly from
Belgium. We had seen with our own eyes, in the
hospitals and along the side of the highways, peasants
who had been hideously wounded or mutilated by
the German soldiers. At Antwerp we had seen
Zeppelins dropping formidable bombs upon the
town, during the night of the 25th of August and
without the slightest warning, and killing women in
their sleep. We had seen those unforgettable streams
of fugitives, men, women, old people, children, who
had hardly succeeded in carrying away a few poor
rags of clothing, and who had been driven from the
villages by the terror of the Prussian burnings and
murders. We knew the character of our people,
both Walloons and Flemings, whom nothing had
prepared for the war and assuredly no one had
encouraged to take part in it, and in particular
the decent inhabitants of the country round Liege,
" a people at once honest, refined and endowed with
a sense of proportion," as M. Gustave Somville has
so truly said of them. We had in our possession the
official copies of declarations already collected and
of reports already issued by the official Commission
of Enquiry. And so it can be understood how

THE AGGRESSION 43

great an effort it required on our part to comprehend
the impudence of the Imperial message, which to
the flagrant injustice of the aggression against
Belgium (an injustice admitted by Herr von Beth-
mann-Hollweg during the session of the Reichstag
of the 4th of August) and to the atrocities of the
German troops, proof of which we possessed, added
a new refinement which we assuredly could never
have anticipated — the criminal's attempt at justi-
fication, who, in order to excuse himself, blackens
the character of his own victim.

The Imperial telegram alleged the necessity of
repressing " guerrilla warfare." It accused the
Belgian Government of having openly incited the
civil population to take part in this war, for which
it had long prepared. It accused women and priests
of cruelty to wounded soldiers.

Not only has it been impossible to prove one of
these grave and formal accusations, but the very con-
trary has been established upon the clearest evidence.

Far from inciting the civil population to join in
the war, the Government had, from the first day
of hostilities, prepared it to adopt the quiet attitude
which the situation demanded.

M. Berryer, the Minister of the Interior, had, on
the 4th of August, caused detailed instructions to be
sent to the 2,700 communes of the kingdom. Posters,
placarded throughout the country, reminded the
people that " the laws of war forbade the civil popu-
lation to take part in hostilities." The mayors

44 THE WAY OF HONOUR

had recommended all to bring their weapons to
the town halls. The religious authorities had
given the same advice as had the civil.

When did the Germans encounter these pretended
francs-tireurs of theirs ? Where have they seen
them at work ? What definite acts have they
committed ? What are their names ? What their
descriptions ? The German Government has pub-
lished certain statements of its officers and soldiers
in an elaborate White Book, the beauty of whose
printing does not succeed in hiding its intrinsic
worthlessness. These statements are less in the
nature of evidence than of complaisant and vague
explanations, furnished by the authors themselves,
of the massacres of Aerschot, Louvain, and Dinant,
embroideries upon the common theme, " Firing
occurred." What remains of this book, after the
reply of the Belgian Commission, after the letters
of the bishops, and after the third Belgian Grey
Book ? And what force can it claim after the
denials which the Cologne Gazette, Vorwaerts and the
Pax bureau themselves have published of the odious
accusation of cruelty to the German wounded which
is so solemnly made in the Imperial dispatch ?

All these wretched excuses fall to the ground one
after the other, to leave bare to the eye, in their
crudity and essential hideousness, the methods to
which the German Army had recourse in Belgium,
in conformity with the orders of its leaders and the
policy of its General Staff.

THE AGGRESSION 45

So many crimes, so many thousands of innocent
people put to death or deported into servitude, so
much beauty and wealth destroyed or plundered,
await the hour of Justice. Violence and trickery
may postpone the coming of that hour, but not
indefinitely.

Among the countless voices which day after day
in the neutral countries continue to express the
indignation of honourable men, I confine myself to
borrowing for reproduction here the following words,
published on the I4th of October 1914 in a great
American newspaper, the Providence Journal :

" William of Germany and his people have their
accounts to make up with God ; no lying will save
them. They have, of their own choice, in their mad
lust of conquest, made of a fair land a veritable
shambles. They have seized by the throat a small
and peaceable nation and have carved it into quiver-
ing morsels ; they have crushed its life out beneath
an iron heel. The different accounts of the German
atrocities may not be all perfectly exact, but many
of them are beyond all question true. However
much there may be of truth and falsehood in the
details, there remains in any case established a
certitude of cruelty and savagery so monstrous
that it extorts the same cry of ' Shame upon this
crime ! ' from every human being who has preserved
within his bosom one spark of charity or of justice.

" The might of Germany, her boasted war-machine,
her supremacy in the arts, the sciences and commerce

46 THE WAY OF HONOUR

may no longer be saved by victories in the field of
battle. They are from now onwards blotted out,
and many a generation must pass in bitter labour
before their country shall again stand upon her feet.
And this is not the result of her succumbing to
superior forces, nor of the check with which she has
met in her campaign of rapine and butchery. No !
It results solely from the circumstance that, with
the pretension to be a great nation worthy to have
her ' place in the sun,' Germany has declared before
the entire world that a treaty is only a ' scrap of
paper ' and that she has, with the hands of a maniac,
proclaiming herself the elect of God, drenched in
blood, by her thousands of murders, a country
whose peace and integrity she herself had sworn
to defend."

This is the simple speech of conscience against
which no cleverness or sophisms may prevail.
Vainly, in their insolent triumph of a day, do those
who at the moment are in occupation of my beloved
country flatter themselves that they will stifle the
protests of the soul of humanity.

Crime passes. The Right is eternal.

II

THE ARMY

THE BELGIAN SOLDIER

A speech delivered in the Hall of King Albert's Hospital
in London on the ist of January 1915, at a con-
ference of the principal organizations in England
which are concerned with Belgian soldiers.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, —

A great German poet, the author of a play called
The Robbers — and this title, I think, has lost none
of its reality — Schiller, in short, on a certain occasion
gave utterance to this profound thought : ' The
punishment of an evil deed," he wrote, " consists
in this, that it inevitably leads to further evil deeds,
which are always worse and worse."

And, indeed, the world has recently witnessed the
proof of this truth. The evil deed which Germany
did when she violated the neutrality of a little
country which she had sworn to protect, this first
crime has forced her upon our soil, in order to extract
her benefit from her act, in order to endeavour to
crush quickly a resistance for whose obstinacy she
had not allowed, to heap crime on crime, each more
infamous than the last. And so has come about
that series of crimes of every sort against International
Law, those robberies, those burnings, those massacres

47

48 THE WAY OF HONOUR

without cause, that methodical execution of a nation,
tortured through its children, its monuments of art,
its beliefs, that whole succession of atrocities and
villainies which throughout the world, in proportion
as the truth comes to light, excite a growing horror
in all honest hearts and devote to shame, for gener-
ations to come, the Army and, I do not hesitate to
add, the people of Germany.

But as to this observation of Schiller, it is a
fancy of mine to reverse it to-day. And I say that
this is the fate and the reward of a good action —
that it continues to engender other good actions,
and these are each better than the last.

The good action of England and France is the loyal
and noble enthusiasm with which they both hastened
to the rescue of that neutrality which they had
guaranteed to us. To this military co-operation they
have added a warm welcome into their own homes,
extended, in these dark days, to our exiled people
and to our national Government itself. And each
day this generosity grows for us larger and larger,
adds continually to its charm, discovers daily new
motives for and new methods of cherishing us — I
was going to say of encouraging us, but where is
the man amongst us who for so much as a second
has dreamed of losing courage ?

And now we encounter to-day a new expression
of these sentiments, at once so eager and so kindly,
in the tumultuous applause which but a moment
ago sounded through this great hall, and in the

THE ARMY 49

generous words to which we have listened — words
of which I will accept not one for myself, but, rather,
all for my country, my Sovereign, and my fellow-
countrymen.

But a few days ago Paris, under the pale sun of
December but in all the brilliance of her sympathy,
saluted and did honour to our three colours, the
red, the yellow, and the black, henceforth the sisters
of the French and British colours.

To-day, London in her turn has desired to salute
and do honour to those who are defending our
dear Belgian flag, those who for it are fighting

and dying.

* * *

The Belgian soldier ! You knew nothing of him,
I fancy, or hardly anything, before that tragic month
of August. We ourselves did not know him or
admire him in that rather old-fashioned uniform
which our national war had not yet made sacred.

You should have seen him on the first day of
mobilization, when the call to arms sounded suddenly
along our sky, up till then so serene, and when, in
a moment, he felt within his bosom the thrill of the
soul of his ancestors, who so hardly won back the
soil of his country from the forest and the sea, and
who during so many centuries so fiercely resisted
the covetousness of the foreigner.

You should have seen him, our little Belgian
soldier, when, alone, on the bridge at Vise and
before Liege, he confronted the German Colossus.

4

50 THE WAY OF HONOUR

And this is already an item of history : a simple
Belgian Division, the Third, supported by a mixed
brigade, hurling backwards three German army
corps four and a half miles. The enemy sent up
fresh troops. One against five, the Belgians stood
their ground and put more than 42,000 Germans
out of action.

You should have seen him, our little Belgian soldier,
on the morrow of that glorious defence of Liege,
contesting the road into Central Belgium step by
step with the terrible invader, who already saw his
plan threatened with disaster ; or fighting heroically
at Eghezee, or at Haelen, or at Diest against an
adversary overwhelmingly his superior, while along
the highways and through the fields the people of
Hesbaye, Hageland and Brabant fled, dumbly,
sullenly, the horror in their eyes of the burnings
and massacres which pursued them.

You should have seen him, our little Belgian
soldier, when, hemmed in within the fortifications
of Antwerp, where the German believed him to be
reduced to impotence, he risked his life in daring
sorties, harassing the Imperial Army, pushing his
way once more to the very gates of ruined Aerschot,
retaking Malines, forcing the Germans between the
9th and I2th of September to bring up towards
Antwerp to encounter him, with all speed, two
army corps, the Third and the Ninth, which were
already on their way south ; and collaborating thus,
at the other extremity of the war, in that miraculous

THE ARMY 51

victory of the Marne which has declared the issue
of this war and made immortal the name of General
Joffre.

And you should have seen him, our little Belgian
soldier, or rather you should see him — for I speak
now of the present moment — in our campaigns by
the Yser, fighting still, fighting always, and this
time upon that scrap of sacred soil to which now,
with your valorous help, all our will to live and all
our certitude of victory are attached.

This country of the Yser, our old Flemish sea-
town, was, I believe, but a few months ago, the
most peaceable and contented spot on which God's
sun shone. Imagine, as far as the eye can reach,
rich pastures intersected by canals and ditches
and populous with towns and villages. Here and
there white, low-built farms, with red-tiled roofs,
were scattered through the green landscape. Rows
of great trees, bent by the wind from the sea, indi-
cated where ran the highroads. Along the western
horizon lay dunes, like some fair garland. The
canvas sails of windmills stood out clear against
the sky.

A few squat towers, many rustic clock-towers,
exquisite belfries, carved like lace, reminded one
of those old religious, municipal, communal and
artistic traditions which lay so near to the hearts
of this thoughtful and energetic people.

To-day — ah ! to-day — you must conceive a melan-
choly plain where, through a sky that is heavy with

52 THE WAY OF HONOUR

fog, pass continually the screaming shrapnel and
the bursting shell. The soil is mud, torn up by
wagons, ploughed by projectiles, drenched in blood.
Here and there floods have spread into great sheets
of water wherein float rubbish and sometimes corpses.
And upon this soil, since the i6th of October, men
are fighting, destroying, killing one another.

How many farms lie in ashes ! How many trees
are prone ! How many mills, towers and belfries
are dead or wounded ! Ypres, Loo, Nieuport,
Dixmude — these are full of ruins. Villages that
have been captured, retaken and lost again, such
as Pervyse and Ramscapelle, have no longer one
house standing. I have seen in one of their grave-
yards, where our soldiers have lately dug rustic
graves for their comrades, in the earth which they
have naively decorated with sand and shells, like
those little altars which, in May, the children build
by the side of our roads — I have seen this : the
sacrilegious shells smashing the crosses, tearing open
graves that have been hardly closed and profaning
the dead.

There, in this corner of sacred soil, so dear to our
hearts — ah ! it is there that you should see our little
Belgian soldier. I will not pretend that his appear-
ance is always of a correctness worthy of the parade
ground, that he is always freshly shaved, or that he
never lacks a button on his cape.

I have found there friends whom I had known
last summer, charming, modest lads, transformed

THE ARMY 53

into bearded veterans in uniforms faded and worn,
stained with mud, fog and rain — which forms a
sort of natural khaki — their boots stained with the
water of the trenches, their rifles blackened with
use. And often what poor rags are upon their
bodies, what worn-out linen — torn, and in holes
everywhere ! " You see, we wear lace for our
fighting," said one of these young poilus to me gaily,
while he displayed before my eyes this glorious
kind of luxury.

But, for all that, what a will to stand fast and to
live again, if need be, through those October days
when, forced, cost what it might, to bar the Calais
road against the German flood, they fought like
paladins, aided from afar by the ships of Britain,
and having alongside of them, their rivals in bravery,
Admiral Ronarch's French marines, those whom the
enemy has nicknamed " the young ladies with the
red pompoms."

What an ardour glows in their eyes when one
evokes the vision of their villages, the memory of
the friends who wait for them — perhaps, for what
fate have they themselves encountered ? — over there,
behind the firing-line, bowed beneath the yoke of
the enemy !

What an heroic simplicity, uniting the humour of
the WTalloon, the tenacity of the Fleming and all
our old bourgeois virtues, wherein to-day works a
new leaven of which formerly we knew nothing —
Hate 1

54 THE WAY OF HONOUR

And again what pride in serving under a young
King — no, by the side of a young King, sans peur
et sans reproche, who, no more beside the Yser than
at Antwerp or at Hofstade, abandons them for a
day or an hour, who, with them, braves the dangers
of the front and, in the trenches, fills their hearts
with his own confidence and strength — this King,
of whom M. Paul Deschanel said the other day that
" his name will be blessed so long as honour dwells
in the heart of man."

And then, you know well enough where also he
should be seen, our little Belgian soldier, where
you have seen him, where you see him still. In
those hospitals and those ambulances where our
wounded and sick lie scattered in their thousands
throughout England and France, and even in your
own homes. They suffer not alone from their wounds.
However kindly his reception may be, however
perfect the attendance that he enjoys, he lies there,
our little soldier, far from his own people, often
without news of them, and it is amongst people, no
doubt compassionate but whose tongue he often
cannot speak, that he must resign himself perhaps
to die ; and this he will do quite simply, and with
the single regret that he has not lived long enough
to see his own country freed from the presence of
a hated race.

Yes, indeed, that little soldier of ours is worthy
to fight shoulder to shoulder with your own, to
carry on his noble task beside the good soldier of

THE ARMY 55

France, sung by Deroulede and praised by Mun, and
the brave soldier of England, whom Kipling under-
stands so well. He deserves that you should love
him as you do, and that you should not only surround
him with your sympathies, but also, as do the admir-
able organizations here represented to-day, do some-
thing to assure to him, for his clothing, his health,
his idleness, and his correspondence, not only that
which is absolutely essential, but also some small
superfluity which, for a soldier, is so very like that
which, for us, is indispensable.

Ah ! but it is touching, this love of one's fellows
to which such organizations as these of yours testify.

We speak of the horrors of war ; and God knows
if we have cause.

But who does not see its beauty also ?

I am not thinking only of those manly virtues which
teach decision, initiative, the art of command and
that of obeying, nor of those patriotic virtues which
subordinate to national unity all domestic differences
and jealousies, nor even of those still more intimate
virtues which give rise to-day, in so many homes,
to so much unknown heroism, and in which families
discover, even in the midst of the bitterest grief, the
secret of their solidarity, children gain unforgettable
examples, and nations learn to perceive the riches,
not the most obvious, but the most certain, of their
moral inheritance.

56 THE WAY OF HONOUR

I think rather of that broad spirit of fraternity
which devotes to the service of the victims of war
all those who, for whatever reason, find themselves
unable themselves to fight.

Where to-day will you find the indifferent, the
egotistical, those Olympian persons who defied
emotion to affect them ?

Already the war of 1870 had dealt them a shrewd
blow. And you may remember the beautiful verse
of Sully-Prudhomme :

Un soupir, n& du mal autour de moi souffert,
M'est venu des citds et des champs de bataille
Pousse" par I'orphelin, le pauvre sur la paille
Et le soldat blesse qui sent son cceur ouvert.

How may we remain deaf to these complaints ?
He who would wish to do so, could not.

Je ne puis, ce souvenir m'obsede comma un blame !
Quelque chose d'humain a traversd mon ame
Et j'ai tons les soucis de la fraternite"

And who will first of all make trial of this happy
law ; who will best respond to it ? Who but woman ?

Her heart seldom recks anything of reasons, but
only of warm impulses which our male reason does
not understand. Her more delicate senses are gifted
with a more subtle perception of practical detail and
of small differences.

Again, with what admirable examples of this
fraternal spirit does woman present us every
hour of this war ! All women, no matter what

THE ARMY 57

their education or their rank may be, from that
poor flower-woman of the Halles who, the other
day, as a funeral passed along, stripped her basket
bare in order to adorn with flowers the coffin of a
soldier whose name she did not know, to those
great ladies for whom wealth and birth are only
arguments in favour of a humble devotion, to that
Queen Elizabeth who stays by the side of the King
and the Army, who shares all their dangers, who is
everywhere to be found by the pillow of the wounded
and the sick, and to whom the other day a poor
dying fellow, his eyelids already closing, his hands
already trembling in the death agony, uttered with
pale lips that ineffable word which in itself sums
up all tenderness and grief : Mother.

Catholic theology knows a dogma of a profound
splendour which is called the Communion of Saints.
According to this doctrine, all those who have been
true to the Faith, living or dead, throughout time
and space, are working, hoping, praying, suffering,
for a single one amongst them all. The martyrs
have shed their pure blood, the confessors have
fought the good fight, the virgins have risen before
the dawn to add their company to that of the stars —
an infinite multitude sings there on high, an infinite
multitude weeps yonder beneath, an infinite multitude
fights here on earth — all this, Church militant, Church
suffering. Church triumphant, all this for a single

58 THE WAY OF HONOUR

unknown being, in order that the least among us
may be helped and comforted and saved.

Do you not feel that this beautiful doctrine finds,
in the formidable crisis which to-day convulses the
earth, a most striking application ?

Here also is a common and immortal task, which
to-day unites into one society millions of souls who,
individually, are unaware of one another's existence.
And in this communion the past, the present and
the future of our races, of our countries, of our
families, meet together and work together to the
same ends. All the thinkers and workers, the
crusaders, the knights and commoners of long
ago, the soldiers of yesterday and of to-day,
the priests who pray and give consolation, the
learned teachers, the artists who thrill us with
noble passion, the workmen who toil, the women
who weave, who nurse, who cheer, all who live
and fight and die beneath our flags, I see
them leagued together for the same vast piece of
work of which each one of us must feel the benefit.
It is for each one of us that all humanity that
is worthy of the name fights, suffers and works to-
day. Let our own souls mount to the height of this
noble conception, so well fitted to arouse our enthu-
siasm, and let us do honour to this sacred alliance
wherein are commingled all those hopes, each
day more thoroughly justified, for the triumph
of Right over brutal Force, of Civilization over
Barbarism, and of Justice over Falsehood.

THE ARMY 59

THE NATIONAL FETE AT THE FRONT

A letter to the Courrier de 1'Armee on the occasion
of the National Fete on the 21 st of July 1915.

DEAR SOLDIERS,—

Do you remember our Twenty-firsts of July in
the days before the war ?

On this day, Brussels and its suburbs awoke,
a little later than usual, to the echoes of a harmless
cannonade " fired," according to the posters, " by
the artillery of the Civic Guard." From that moment
the official programme, with its anticipated delights,
was carried out in conformity with the traditional
ceremonies advertised each year in the Moniteur
Beige. Pouring from all sides into the capital by
the North, South and Luxembourg stations, streams
of holiday-making country folk arrived to swell the
throng of citizens. Little by little, in the wake
of heavy banners covered with tinkling medals, ac-
companied by the blaring of brass and the thumping
of drums, the societies of every kind, each headed
by an important-looking president in his dress-suit
and silk hat, got under way and moved in the direction
of the Grand' Place, with a step that was more or
less military. In the vicinity of the Palais des
Academies and the Cinquantenaire, there was a
sea of heads wherein the advances, the pauses and
the eddies of an ill-ordered crowd jostled numerous

60 THE WAY OF HONOUR

simple souls, weighed down with parcels and children,
who proudly displayed the new and glittering
insignia of the Mutualite or the Sauvetage Societies.
The Te Deum marked the culmination of the festivity.
From the Treurenberg the idlers, kept in order by
the lines of soldiers, policemen and superb gendarmes,
pressed together to see the carriages which were
being escorted to Sainte-Gudule, and well-informed
persons pointed out the famous people whose
formal profiles and glittering uniforms were to be
seen through the glass of the carriage doors. After
which a tradition equally venerable and less exhaust-
ing demanded that at the Grand-Sablon, where
the tournament of la petite balle an tamis was played,
the head of the Government, glass in hand and
turning towards M. de Mot or M. Max, would cele-
brate the virtues of the " Iambic " of Brussels.
Hardly had it taken its fill of regattas, balloon
ascents, festivals, processions and matches, when
the crowd hastened to witness the free representa-
tions in French and Flemish, forming into long
queues at the doors of the theatres. And the town
and its suburbs went to their beds that night a little
later than usual, after having hailed with their last
cries of admiration the last bouquets of fireworks
let off in the Bois by Messrs. Ricard.

Such was our Twenty-first of July at Brussels.
And in the provinces, with but slight variations,
it was wont to pass after the same fashion. And
all that sort of thing, we may as well admit it, did

THE ARMY 61

not make any very exalted appeal to the imagina-
tion and sentiments of the crowd.

I am mistaken. There was one event which,
so long as life permitted, always introduced into
this rather commonplace programme a note of true
emotion and the purest patriotism. This was the
appearance of the old heroes of 1830, whose bodies,
though bowed with age, held themselves proudly
on this day, wearing the old blue blouse fastened
by the cartridge-belt, and whose heads, though
grey and trembling, recaptured something of their
martial carriage under the trim cap of astrakhan
adorned with its tricolour cockade.

And I remember how, on the Twenty-first of July
1905, at the time of the marvellous fete of the Place
Poelaert, when King Leopold, Prince Albert, Princess
Elizabeth and our little Princes went to salute those
veterans of our most glorious time who sat in the
place of honour, a thrill ran through the whole vast
crowd, and I know more than one heart which
swelled with emotion and more than one eye which
was moist with tears. That little band of veterans
called up before us an heroic age. They represented
for us the Days of September, with their barricades,
their fusillades in the Park and the fighting at
Berchem and Borgerhout. Better still, they brought
back to our memories all the obstinate effort of a
nation which had so long been resolved to live its
own life — which, in 1830, through the energy and
union of its sons reached at last its goal, where it
meant most assuredly to remain.

62 THE WAY OF HONOUR

And it is of those old men, the Fathers of their
Country, that I think first of all, now that this
National Fete of the Twenty-first of July 1915 has
dawned.

Ah ! this Twenty-first of July, our King will not
spend it in official ceremonies nor in popular rejoicings.
He will give it to his noble business of soldiering,
surrounded by our Army, there in that inviolate
corner of our land where Leopold I first set foot on
Belgian soil in July 1831.

The salvoes which to-day awaken you, dear sons
of our Nation in Arms, are those which carry death
from afar into your ranks or the ranks of your
enemies. Instead of the " flons-flons " of the
trumpets, you will listen to the orders which are
passed along in whispers through the trenches.
The ascents which your eyes will follow into the
clouds will be the daring flights of the Taubes or
the bomb-dropping Aviatiks. Your Bengal Lights
will be perhaps those asphyxiating gases which
Kultur at Bay unleashes upon you.

As for the men of 1830, they have obtained from
Heaven their last discharge. But a little time before
the war the last of them fell into his last sleep. He
lies, like his comrades, beneath that soil which their
common efforts have made free.

The last combatants of 1830 are with us no longer.
But you are here, you heroes of Liege, of Haelen,
of Hofstade and of the Yser.

And, thanks to you, how noble is the National

THE ARMY 63

Fete which Belgium celebrates to-day ! Yes, nobler
than our most famous " ommeganck " and " land-
juweel " of other days, more beautiful than the Song
of Roland, fairer than all the epics of long ago !

And how different she is from the peaceful image
that we formed of her, hardly a year ago, this Belgium
of to-day which rises in your midst, like some loving
mother who, having rocked you in her arms and
having then watched over your childhood and youth,
over your homes, your fields, your labours and your
sorrows, calls you now to her aid, to revenge her
wrongs, to save the city, to win back the altars that
have been cast down, the tombs of your ancestors,
the cradles of your children.

I know full well, dear soldiers of my homeland — for
I know you well — you have no love for fine speeches.

But it is no vain talk, I think, on a day so solemn
as this, to call up to your thoughts all the forces
that are fighting on your side, that you may feel,
stronger than ever, all the pride of your estate ; that
the frank comradeship which holds you together
may thereby become more close than before; that
your hearts may thence draw, if it be possible, yet
greater courage and tenacity.

It is all our present that fights for you.

Invaded Belgium endures with patience a cruel
servitude, because she looks to you for deliverance.

Scattered Belgium supports without complaint
all the deprivations and longings of exile, because
she looks to you to bring her home again.

64 THE WAY OF HONOUR

All our past fights for you, too: the Belgians of
Ambiorix who defended their soil against the greed
of Rome; those who, led by a Charles Martel or a
Godfrey of Bouillon, battled for the civilization of
the West ; the men of the communes, who, at the side
of Breydel and De Coninck, poured out their red
blood for their liberties, like the Franchimontois of
Josse de Strailhe, who sacrificed their lives to avenge
the city of Liege that a perjured king had betrayed.

All humanity worthy of the name is fighting for
you, since your bravery is to set free not only Belgium,
but Europe herself, threatened as she is for a moment
by the Prussian monster — not only to set Europe
free, but the Universal Conscience, in whose eyes
you stand for respect for that given word which is
the very basis of civilization and of God's Law.

Finally, all our future fights for you.

Your will, your discipline, your courage have
with them and behind them the fate of our children,
who will owe it to you that they are free men and
that they bear — and with what pride ! — that name
of Belgian, which to-day shines with the noblest
splendour.

In the National Fetes that are to come, it is to
you that those children will pay their most enthusi-
astic homage.

They will learn to honour the conquerors of the
Yser as the new Fathers of their Country.

And when you in your turn shall be old men, it
will be yours to sit, during the Te Deums and the

THE ARMY 65

patriotic rejoicings, in those places of honour where
our glorious veterans of 1830 used to sit, and it is
towards you that the gratitude of a whole people
shall ascend.

Think of that, dear soldiers of to-day, upon this
Twenty-first of July 1915.

Think of it when in your camp you sing that
fine verse of the Brabangonne, that which we ought
all to adopt as the simplest and the best, and every
line of which says so well, in its own style of 1830,
that which all have felt ever since : that stanza whose
echoes will thrill — as in the famous ballade — over
there, beyond the battle lines, through the bones
of our men of 1830 — here, on this side of it, behind
your trenches, through the corpses, hardly cold, of
your glorious comrades whose simple crosses decorate
like flowers this soil of their fatherland which their
courage and yours have heroically defended :

O Belgique, 6 Mere cherie,

A toi nos caurs, a toi nos bras,

A toi notre sang, 6 Patrie !

Nous le jurons tons, oui, tu vivras !

Tu vivras toujours grande et belle,

Et ton invincible unite

Aura pour devise immortelle :

Le Roi, la Loi, la Liberte !

LIEGE AND THE YSER

NATIONAL anniversaries are landings arranged by
History upon the staircase of the centuries. They
offer to a people periodical seasons for collecting

5

66 THE WAY OF HONOUR

its thoughts and for seeking in the lessons of the
past teaching whence the efforts of the morrow may
profit.

Belgium, before the war, knew but one official
anniversary — the Twenty-first of July, the date
of the accession of our dynasty and one in which
a regard for Dutch feelings had merged the com-
memoration of the independence won during
September 1830. We also celebrated, without any
Act of Parliament having given to this cere-
mony the character of a legal institution, the date
of the King's patron saint, St. Leopold, and then
St Albert.

But an intruder, the war, has come to mark
with its tragic and bloodstained finger, in the
calendar of our national life, new and ineffaceable
anniversaries.

First of all there is the date of the 4th of August.
Upon this day, in that year of horror 1914, about
ten o'clock in the morning, was consummated, by
the violation of our soil, the most flagrant and, without
doubt, the most odious crime of modern history.
At the same moment and at a blow, a unanimous
access of indignation laid hold upon the national
conscience, and Belgian Unity was definitely con-
solidated in blood and tears.

I could wish that, after the war, throughout
liberated Belgium, each year, on the 4th of August
at ten o'clock in the morning, the activity of work,
both intellectual and manual, may for a moment

THE ARMY 67

cease, and that then, in the silence of courts, schools,
workshops, factories, fields, offices and shops, word
and movement being suspended, as in the Mass during
the consecration of the Host and the Chalice, all the
bells, from one end of the country to the other, from
Vise to La Panne, from Antwerp to Virton, may
be set ringing to sound the alarm, as in the times
of the Klokke Roland of Ghent and the Ban Henri
of Liege.

With regular and solemn strokes, from city to
city, from village to village, the bells of the churches
and the belfries, even those of the schools and the
factories, shall recall to every one, great and small
alike, the perjury of Germany and the response of
Belgium — the shame of the one and the glory of the
other. Recurring thus regularly to stay the stream
of forgetfulness, that solemn knell shall revive in
our souls and those of our children, simultaneously
with the sacred memory of heroic deeds, of mourning
and of ruin, the sentiment of our Unity and our
readiness for those sacrifices which the defence of
the country will continue to demand of each one of
us. And I believe that the echo of those pealing
bells will be heard beyond our sea and land frontiers,
as a sort of universal lesson. It will each year call
to memory anew the contrast between the cynical
language used on that day in the Reichstag by the
German Chancellor and the noble words which at
the same moment King Albert addressed to the
representatives of the Belgian nation. It will

68 THE WAY OF HONOUR

evoke, for eyes other than ours, the vision of the
heroes and martyrs of the Right :

Ceux qui sont marts pour le monde, Id-bas,
A Litge.1

A second anniversary must also be inscribed in
any national calendar : that of the last days of
October, during which our victorious resistance on
the Yser reached its height.

At the moment when we were gathered by the
Yser, on the I5th of October, the left wing of the
French was still at La Bassee. Our infantry, to
the number of 48,000, supported by 6,000 French
marine fusiliers, had not had a moment's rest since
the beginning of the campaign. Broken with fatigue,
anxiety and lack of clothing, they seemed incapable
of any further effort. First of all they were required
to hold fast during forty-eight hours, unaided,
upon a line of 40 kilometres, against the countless
hordes of Germans who, from north and east, were
moving against Calais. They stood their ground
through fifteen days, in spite of their uniforms in
rags, their failing limbs, their empty stomachs— in
spite of the shells and the machine-guns, the rain
and the mud; and thanks to them the pride of the
enemy offensive in Belgium was definitely broken.

The lapse of time gives, little by little, to this
great defensive battle, as well as to that of the Marne,

1 Emile Verhaeren, Les Ailes rouges de la Guerre.

THE ARMY 69

its true proportions, and assigns to it its proper
measure of importance, like the height of those
monuments which grow taller the further we move
away from them.

If, instead of standing fast upon the Yser, our Army
had given way, what, without any doubt, would
have happened ? For the general cause of the Entente
it Would have meant the establishment of the enemy
at Dunkirk and Calais and the consolidation of his
power, opposite the English coast, over those two
great French ports at a time when the United Kingdom
had not yet fully co-ordinated its forces. It would
have meant the interception of all sea transport
at its most vital point. It would have meant the
envelopment of the common battle-line of the Allies.
For Belgium in particular it would have meant
not only the reduction of our Army to a status of
sheer hazard, but also our legitimate authorities
robbed of all the prestige which they gained from
the retention of however small a strip of the national
soil, and their exposure to those humiliations and
those monstrous legal absurdities of which the
recent bluff over Poland has enabled us to measure
the audacity.

The results which have followed, and which will
still follow, this battle of the latter end of October
1914 will not efface its importance and glory. From
its own splendour, no less than from its strategic
and political effects, it will remain in the history
of our country as an event of the first order, worthy

70 THE WAY OF HONOUR

to be commemorated as well by the present generation
as by our remotest posterity.

This was the reason for the manifestation which
took place at Havre on the 2Qth of October 1916.
Such was the sentiment which was expressed in the
masterly address given on that occasion by the
head of the Belgian Cabinet, wherein criticism can
find no fault, unless it be the silence which was
maintained with regard to the part, of such im-
portance, played during those glorious days by the
Minister of War himself.

Such also was the meaning of the precious tribute
offered to our Army by Admiral Lacaze, in the name
of the French Government, and that of the marines
who gave us such valiant support.

This finally was the cause of the beautiful book l
which was devoted to this celebration, and which
will keep its memory warm. Could we have desired
for the Editing Committee of this publication a better
assistant than Commandant Willy Breton, the
historian, at once conscientious and eloquent, of
our military glory ?

Set in motion by the Havre celebrations, the
tradition of this anniversary will soon mingle its
thread with the web of our national customs. From
year to year, the end of October, thus consecrated,
will allow those of us who lived while the Battle of
the Yser was fought, and, later, those who shall

1 La Bataille de I' Yser : Commemoration de son deuxibme
anniversaire (Paris, Berger-Levrault) .

THE ARMY 71

inherit the benefits of it, to discharge their debt
towards the leaders who directed it and the soldiers
who won it, towards the dead as towards those who
survived. It will give them an opportunity of
offering their tribute of admiration and gratitude,
at once, to all the men who fought on the Yser, in
that they contributed by the heroism of their deeds
and their trials, whether at Dixmude, Tervaete,
Nieuport, Schoobakke, Pervyse, or elsewhere, to
the shattering of the German invasion and to the
preservation of that inviolate and forever sacred
corner of the Fatherland.

This inviolate corner our Army has never ceased
to defend. And assuredly the memory of October
1914 will never cause us to forget or to fail to under-
stand what tenacity, what skill, what heroism have
been lavished there at every moment since that time.

Upon the day when Germany shall have been
thrown back and shall have freed Belgium from
her odious contamination, with what enthusiasm will
our families — to-day scattered, but then reunited —
overwhelm with the same gratitude all their defenders
and all their liberators !

Into what ingenious and touching forms that
gratitude will seek to translate itself we have already
an indication in the reports which come to us from
the occupied territory.

At the reopening of our Law Courts, in October
1916, M. du Pont, First President of the Cour de
Cassation, speaking publicly in the Palais de Justice

72 THE WAY OF HONOUR

at Brussels (of which a part has been turned into
a guardroom by the enemy), after having called
to his hearers' memory the warriors of 1830 who
rest under the monument in the Place des Martyrs,
added the following words :

" Ought we not, my dear colleagues, to bind our-
selves with a vow ? This building of ours is immense.
The Salle des Pas-Perdus is limitless. Many colon-
nades here surround us. Innumerable are those
long vestibules which the public and we ourselves
traverse day by day. Do not these immense chambers
offer a space sufficiently large whereon to trace upon
their walls, in letters of gold, the names of all those
brave men who have fallen with so much courage
and valiant tenacity ? In a place of honour,
peculiarly visible, should appear, gloriously reunited,
the names of the dead who belonged to the legal
profession. In the midst of this magnificent memorial
should shine finally two works by our most celebrated
artists : on the one hand, ' Valour defending the
Right,' showing King Albert giving the example to
our intrepid legions ; on the other, ' Charity, con-
soler of the dying Hero,' represented by Queen Eliza-
beth, that guardian angel who comforts by her sweet
words and her motherly ministrations the brave
victims of battle. How proudly thenceforward
would our profession carry on its work in such
a veritable national Pantheon, which should be
still more worthy to bear its noble title of ' Palais
de Justice.' After doing what lay in our powe

THE ARMY 73

to share in the nation's sacrifices, it would be a
veritable reward to us, and assuredly an immense
honour, thus to take our part, day by day, in this
homage which our glorious martyrs would receive/'

Such a proposal not only gains a singular authority
from the high station of the magistrate who has
conceived it, and who himself is attached to the
army by many ties of blood. It not only captures
our attention from the dramatic nature of the cir-
cumstances in which, face to face with the enemy,
its courageous author formulated it. Those who
require of a national memorial something more than
material wealth or beauty, will find in this suggestion
the expression of a symbolism at once precise and
profound. Is it not indeed in the temple of Justice
that the names of those who have fallen in the
cause of Justice should be inscribed ? Having
given their lives for fidelity to a contract — and
it is upon respect for the given word that the
whole social life of both nations and individuals
reposes — will they not have deserved that their
memory and their example should remain associated
with the idea of human justice and its daily inter-
pretation, that so that memory and that example
may be cherished and perpetually renewed ?

Other plans of the kind will doubtless be brought
forward which will not interfere with this one and
which its realization will in no way embarrass.
That on which we must be resolved — and this
is why it is to-day not too early to institute these

74 THE WAY OF HONOUR

anniversaries and to begin to think about these com-
memorations— is to give to the defenders of their
country their proper share of glory — glory, the Sun
of the Dead — to assure to those who shall be born
the lesson of so much heroism and sacrifice, so that
they may prove ready to exhibit these virtues anew,
on the day when our national honour shall again
require it of them.

All the philosophy of History shows the truth of
the advice given in the Book of the Maccabees :
" Remember the exploits of your fathers and the
things which they did in their time, and you shall
gather from that memory a great joy and a name
which shall never be lost/'

TO THE VICTIMS OF DUTY

A speech made on the i^th of December 1915, in the
Place d'Armes at Havre, on the occasion of the
national funeral of the victims of the catastrophe
of Graville-Sainte-Honorine (the explosion of the
arsenal of the Belgian Army).

GENTLEMEN, —

As the mouthpiece of the whole Belgian nation,
it is the sad and sacred duty of the King's Govern-
ment to offer to the victims of the catastrophe of
the nth of December its most profound homage
and its last farewell.

THE ARMY 75

This first duty entails another, that of offering
our warmest sympathy to those mourning French
and Belgian families whom this catastrophe has
smitten, and many of whom, at this very moment,
are still unaware of their misfortune.

To the Government of the Republic, which has
insisted on being represented here by one of its
Ministers and one of its Under-Secretaries of State,
to the authorities of the Department of Seine
Inferieure, to those of the town of Havre and its
neighbouring communes, to the directors of the
industrial concern, which has also suffered loss, we
ought and we wish to express both the sense of
comradeship in sacrifice and all the gratitude which
we feel for the generous impulse which leads them
to join in our mourning.

If it is true that nothing more strongly unites us
than suffering endured and courageously accepted
in common, let us be thankful, gentlemen, that Fate
is to-day prodigal of the opportunities which she
affords us of proving and cementing the friendship
of France and Belgium. And now that friendship,
already so strictly united in the service of the same
ideals of honour and liberty, watered each day during
long months by the tears of our orphans and the
blood of our martyrs and our soldiers, has recently
been more firmly than ever welded — were it possible
— by a terrible and mysterious blow.

It should have been the task of Baron de Broque-
ville, in his double role of Minister for War and

76 THE WAY OF HONOUR

of the Cabinet, to express here the sentiments of the
Government. But the duties of his office have
retained him with the Army, and he has begged me
to express the regret which he feels at being unable
to be present in person at this ceremony, at which
he has instructed the head of his military cabinet
to represent him. On the other hand, from the
very first moment, he has done everything in his
power to ensure that the moral and material conse-
quences of the catastrophe shall be lessened, if not
repaired.

In a few moments, in a few seconds, more than a
hundred Belgian soldiers have died, the victims of
their duty, the servants of their country.

Let us call them up before our memories. I see
them, those honest workmen of ours, whom the first
call to mobilization had surprised in the midst of
their peaceful labours, strong toilers of our forges
and our coal-mines, hastening from their humming
hives of industry in Flanders or the Walloon districts,
from that fair valley of the Meuse, from that black
country of Hainault that thrilled throughout its
length and breadth with that industrial activity
which was one of the principal sources of our wealth
and our pride. I see them, those good sons of our
towns and our country-side, with their rather clumsy
gait and their thoughtful, energetic faces, such as
Constantin Meunier loved to trace. I hear them in
their rough talk or singing the praises of their Flemish
and Walloon provinces. One day, upon our peaceful

THE ARMY 77

country where men still believed in the word given,
the news of Germany's hateful perjury fell like a
thunderbolt. Upon that day they offered their
flesh and their blood to Belgium, quite simply and
without any reserve. They too did their duty as
soldiers in that unequal and heavy struggle for the
soil of Belgium, defending her foot by foot, during
more than two months and then in the historic
campaign of the Yser. Some of them wounded in
the war, but all chosen for their technical skill, they
were given, in the national work, a new task which,
under an intelligent and experienced chief, seemed
to call them back to their former occupations. And
then came another thunderbolt ! And now we
see them around us in their nameless coffins,
officers and soldiers, Flemings and Walloons, their
limbs mingled together and scattered, but reunited
all in death, as they were in their toil and their
military duty.

Of a truth its echoes were heard afar, that thunder-
clap— much farther than this fair region of Normandy
which teaches us every day to appreciate more truly
the warmth of its welcome. It echoed dismally
in our camps and our trenches, in the ears of our
soldiers whose good comrades and fellow-workmen
these dead had been. But still farthe- did its sound
carry — far beyond the firing-line, into the very heart
of suffering Belgium ; and I think of those women
and children who have remained yonder, of the
hearts of those fathers and mothers, of the anguish

78 THE WAY OF HONOUR

of questioning families, whose agony will be pro-
longed, whether by the absence of news, or perhaps —
worse still — by the exaggeration of the reports which
will filter through the poisonous vapours of the
German news service.

Let them know, however, that when their loss
shall have been established, our grief — the grief
of us all — will have anticipated their own and that
it will have associated from to-day, in one common
admiration, in one common prayer to God, together
with the thousands of our soldiers who have fallen
on the field of honour, that company that Com-
mandant Stevens directed, and those French work-
men, their brothers in toil, whom the same death
has overtaken. For it is as good service to one's
country to renew and add to those munitions which
will one day give her a lasting victory. And for
him who dies in that service there will shine also
a ray of moral beauty on his name for the consolation
and just pride of his children. Upon his pale and
bleeding brow too the lips of his grateful country
shall be pressed.

Amidst the din of the war through which we are
passing these victims now rest in peace. And that
peace is of the Light which never dies.

We, gentlemen, shall return to the struggle and
to our work. Cruel though this catastrophe may be,
there is not amongst us one who will allow it for an
instant to diminish his courage. When one soldier
falls, another takes his place. Where one workshop

THE ARMY 79

is destroyed, two others shall arise to-morrow. The
steel of our hearts — which neither the horrors of the
invasion, the mourning and ruin that have been
heaped up, the pangs of separation, the longings
and the hardships of exile, the poison even of slander,
have been able to corrode — nothing shall prove capable
of affecting so long as it may impair the unity of our
national life, the ardour of our determination to
fight on and our absolute certainty of victory.

We can be very strong, gentlemen, while we hold,
within our untroubled souls, the knowledge that we
are working for the Right.

" It is not," says Carlyle truly, " that which a
man has or has not outside himself which constitutes
his happiness or his misery. Nakedness, hunger,
distress of every kind, death itself, have been suffered
courageously, when the heart has been right/'

Those whom we should pity are they who do evil
and who have felt and even admitted that they
do it. The true misery is the decay of the soul, the
shame without remedy of those who, knowing that
they commit injustice and, attempting a moment to
deceive themselves by the sophisms of their Kultur
or the cynicism of their pride, heap up corpses and
ruins without even succeeding in raising them as
high as the scorn of honourable men and the re-
proaches of that Eternal Truth which they will
never stifle, no, not even in their own souls.

No man may forever stifle the Right. Soon or
late, its hour will come.

8o THE WAY OF HONOUR

And that hour — we know that it is coming. After
the Passion has been endured, it will sound for us
the Redemption, that is to say, Liberation and
Glory.

Dear victims, whose names we scarcely know,
and who will not, you too, have died in vain, take
now your last rest in that heavenly peace which the
country promises to her good servants who have
fallen for her and which the Christian faith assures
to them. Take your rest in the shadow of these
two dear flags which brotherhood unites — that of
Belgium, the symbol of desecrated Justice, and that
of France which, faithful to its destiny and its glory,
embodies the liberty of the Nations. And may you
soon, in their shadow, thrill to the loud echoes of
a victory which we shall share in common.

Ill

THE PEOPLE

THE ENDURANCE OF THE BELGIAN
PEOPLE

A speech delivered on the ijth of May 1915 in the
Town Hall of Saint-Etienne.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, —

Allow me to make a confession to you. When
I received the invitation of the authorities of the
Department of the Loire and of this great city to
address you, honourable and pressing though the
invitation was, I hesitated at first to accept it.

We are living to-day through times both serious
and pathetic, to which the motto of Hoche, Res, non
verba, is singularly appropriate. This very morning
I read, in a Paris newspaper, this reflection of a
humorous writer : "In time of war the first useless
mouths are those of the politicians."

In spite of this scruple, I stand, however, before
you to-day, and it appears to me that I have more
than one duty to accomplish here.

Was it not becoming that, after having paid our
homage to Paris, we should also come to salute that
French province, and particularly these districts
of Forez and Lyonnais, wherein so many of our
working people are being so generously entertained ?

6 s i

82 THE WAY OF HONOUR

It seems to us that it is precisely in your part of
the country that the fortunate diversity of the French
temperament declares itself under certain aspects
which we Belgians could desire ourselves to exhibit :
the respect, namely, for family traditions, the
domestic virtues and hospitality, the maintenance
of a sane balance between intelligence and goodwill,
initiative and an unwearying diligence in affairs
of industry and commerce, a serious outlook upon
life and a passion for progress.

It is for these reasons that I have consented, ladies
and gentlemen, to be the bearer to you of the greeting
of the King's Government and its deep gratitude
for what you have done and are doing every day
for our refugees. Your public authorities and your
private enterprises, the heads of the department
and of the town and our Consul and his assistants,
all have interested themselves in their cause, adding
to that interest, as the President of the Republic
promised us when we landed at Havre, " all the
warmth of a brotherly affection."

It is this same brotherly affection which makes
your hospitality at once so thorough and so tactful.
This it is which has brought into being, for the benefit
of an unfortunate people who have been driven
from their homes by a veritable invasion of Bar-
barians, and that, one of the most atrocious which
History can show, so many ingenious organizations
destined to temper for them the bitterness of their
poverty, their grief and their exile.

THE PEOPLE 83

It is this which expresses itself to-day in the
courtesy with which you have received me and by
the eagerness with which you have come here to listen
to yet another voice that is to speak about Belgium.

To this duty which I desire to perform must be
added a certain hope in which I know you will pardon
any presumption that there may be.

It seems to me, coming as I do directly from the
battle front and having been enabled on many
occasions, during these latter months of the war,
to pass through not only the Belgian lines, but also
those of the French and the British, having on the
other hand had occasion to obtain very trustworthy
information about the spirit of those of our provinces
and of your departments which have been invaded
— it seems to me that perhaps, chatting together
about those places, we may be able to come to some
understanding of that marvellous atmosphere of
courage and confidence which surrounds not only
the men who are fighting, but also those of our
fellow-countrymen who remain prisoners upon their
own soil.

Ah ! believe me — civilians though we be — we
do not mean to allow ourselves to be outdone in
tenacity and endurance by our heroes in the trenches.
This fair land of France — which superficial critics
accused at one time of being degenerate — what a
marvellous example of moral resilience and physical
health, of simple heroism, of harmonious beauty,
she has given during ten months to an admiring

84 THE WAY OF HONOUR

world ! And how, in every rank of her society,
the French soul has appeared truly as the mistress
of the body which it animates. But this calm energy,
this unyielding determination, if they are to be
found everywhere in France, nowhere are they
exhibited so perfectly as in the midst of the Army,
among the valiant soldiers of France, England
and Belgium, who, at this very moment, only six
or seven hundred kilometres from this spot, are at
grips with all the difficulties and vicissitudes of their
gigantic struggle.

I am mistaken. There is a place where, perhaps,
confidence in the final triumph is still more extra-
ordinary and where it is certainly more touching : I
mean on the other side of the firing-line, in those
occupied regions where our fellow-countrymen,
yours as well as ours, in spite of nameless sufferings,
have not for one single instant permitted their hope
and their endurance to falter.

We, who count among those compatriots, separated
from us for a while, children, parents, friends — let
us transport ourselves in thought into their midst.

May the same strength under tribulation which
sustains our invaded provinces arouse our own
resolve, so that in this sacred communion we may
find food for that beneficial and balanced optimism
which is becoming, more and more, an essential
factor of victory.

THE PEOPLE 85

" Before the war," as our poet, Emile Verhaeren,
justly observes, " Belgium was a country both
peaceful, industrious and rich. The centuries had
moulded her with a kindly hand. Twice, in the
course of history, her art had dominated Europe. . . .
If ever a people had shown itself worthy to colla-
borate, with its independent and lofty spirit, in the
work of the civilization of the world, it was truly
the Belgian nation."

This nation dwelt under the protection of five
Great Powers, who had imposed upon it and guaran-
teed to it a permanent neutrality, to which it had
remained invariably faithful. Its life was a happy
one, and each day brought us further good reason
for admiring this courageous people, this small
Fatherland, this slowly and patiently wrought work
to which the efforts of our workmen, both manual
and intellectual, had alike contributed and which
rejoiced to see itself, as it were, embodied in the
personality of a young, brilliant and active King.

War ! How few of us had seriously contemplated
it. The danger of being attacked by Germany ?
Had she nourished such a suspicion, Belgium would
have been instantly accused by Germany of failing
in her duty of neutrality towards her. What an
outrage upon the King of Prussia, who had promised
under oath in 1839, for himself and his successors,
to carry out and observe the treaty of neutrality in
all its points and articles without exception, and not
to suffer others to violate it ! Had not this oath been

86 THE WAY OF HONOUR

confirmed many times since then ? At the instance
of Gladstone it was renewed in 1870, at the time
when the Franco-German War broke out. In the
course of official visits and diplomatic conversations
the same guarantees had been lavished upon us. In
1905 the Ambassador of Germany at Brussels re-
minded us that respect for the neutrality of Belgium
was an article of Germany's faith. In 1907 Germany
put her signature at The Hague to that axiom of
International Law : "The territory of neutral Powers
is inviolable." In 1910 the Kaiser came to Brussels,
accompanied by the Empress and Princess Victoria
Louise ; nor did he fail to give utterance to a wealth
of protestations of sympathy for our country and our
reigning House.

On the 29th of April 1913, in reply to questions
asked in the Reichstag, Herr von Jagow, Under-
secretary for Foreign Affairs, and Herr von Heeringen,
Minister for War, declared : ' The neutrality of
Belgium is determined by international Conventions,
and Germany is resolved to respect those Conven-
tions." In the month of November 1913, King
Albert, who, in accordance with the courtesies which
are practised between monarchs, had been appointed
Honorary Colonel of the i6th Hanoverian Dragoons,
went to pay a visit to his regiment at Lunebourg.
He was received and abundantly complimented
by General von Emmich. . . . Less than nine months
later, Germany suddenly attacked this little country
which she had sworn to protect and General von

THE PEOPLE 87

Emmich was in command of the forces that carried
out the assault upon the fortress of Liege.

What had happened ? As late as the 2nd of
August the German Ambassador at Brussels had
given during the afternoon the assurance that we
had nothing to fear from our neighbours on the east.
The same evening, at seven o'clock, he handed to us
the outrageous ultimatum which left us the choice
between two alternatives : to allow Germany to
violate our neutrality in order to take France by
surprise, and in this case to receive, together with
the Imperial friendship, the price of such a piece of
treason, or else to be treated as enemies by the most
formidable military Power in the world. Could
Germany allege the smallest complaint against us ?
Not one. The famous declaration of Herr von
Bethmann-Hollweg of the 4th of August admits that
the Right was unjustly violated in our person and
offers but the one excuse — and what an excuse ! The
wish to attack France more quickly and more easily !
At the very moment when the First Army Corps of
Germany fell before Liege upon the Third Belgian
Division, our Ambassador at Berlin, Baron Beyens,
was still asking Herr von Jagow : " Can you reproach
us with anything at all ? Have we not accomplished
everything which the duties of our neutrality re-
quired ? " And Herr von Jagow had replied :
" Germany has nothing with which to reproach
Belgium. Your attitude has always been of an
exemplary correctness."

88 THE WAY OF HONOUR

The whole drama is made manifest in these few
sentences :

The loyalty of a little country upon which the
Powers had imposed a perpetual neutrality as the
very foundation of its international existence, and
which was careful scrupulously to observe the duties
which she had undertaken.

The duplicity of one of those Powers which, having
assumed the obligation to guarantee the indepen-
dence and neutrality of Belgium, continued up to
the last moment to deceive her with regard to its
true intentions.

A psychological and moral mistake on the part
of this same Power, which believes that treaties
of the most solemn kind are nothing, for others as
for itself, from the moment when they become
embarrassing, but " scraps of paper."

The simple honesty of the little neutral country
which means to remain faithful to her sworn faith,
let it cost her what it may.

Since then a year has gone by.

The enemy believed that he would enter Paris on
the I5th of August 1914. Well, on that day General
Leman held him still in check before Liege.

All his plan was to crush France to the earth in
an overwhelming offensive ; then to turn upon the
Russian Bear. " To move quickly," said Herr von
Jagow to Sir Edward Goschen on the 4th of August,
" that is the trump card of Germany. That of Russia
is her inexhaustible resources of men." Germany

THE PEOPLE 89

staked her future upon her rapidity. She lost the
trick. And now, after ten months of furious effort, she
has not yet succeeded in destroying the Belgian Army,
which, more seasoned to war and more courageous
than ever, continues to confront her on Belgian soil
under the leadership of King Albert, while by its
side the armies of France and England stand, more
united, stronger, more determined and better armed
than on the first day of the war.

And in the same way, after these ten months, the
moral resistance which more than seven million
Belgians are opposing to the invasion has only
grown stronger.

To the shameful massacres, burnings and pillage,
to the base tricks to which the enemy resorts in order
to terrorize or sow dissension among the people,
an endurance every day more firm, a patriotism
every hour more splendid, give their answer. ' What
since the beginning of the war," asks Maurice Barres,
in one of those masterly passages which have strength-
ened so many hearts and elevated so many minds,
" has appeared in the world that is truly new ?
Millions of corpses, whole countries in flames, nations
delivered over to torment ? These things are not
so novel. But that which no one on earth has
ever seen is the moral splendour of which we are
the witnesses and these millions of transfigured souls
amongst which we are to-day living.

" Throughout the invaded districts and elsewhere,
in all the families which the war has directly affected,

90 THE WAY OF HONOUR

the petty thoughts of every day have been swept
away like so much dust, and one perceives the divine
basis of all things. I mean something eternal and
infinite, a power always the same throughout the
ages, an ardent passion of devotion, of sacrifice and
self -emulation. "

The resistance of the free soul beneath the German
terror is for us a just cause of pride, while it more
and more disconcerts the psychology of our enemies.

You have heard of the courage of my brave
friend Adolphe Max, the Mayor of Brussels, to-day
a prisoner with so many others in the gaols of
Prussia.

You have read that already historic letter of
Cardinal Mercier, where, in such noble words, breaks
forth the protest of the Christian conscience.

And how many other things, less known but
characteristic each in its own degree, could I add
to these !

On the day after the occupation of Brussels, the
Germans had transformed our monumental Palais
de Justice into I know not what barracks which
rapidly became a sink of iniquity. Entrance was
denied to all but holders of passes sparingly dis-
tributed, and the Judges had at their disposal for
the conduct of trials only a few rooms that were
difficult of access. The Cour de Cassation replied
to this procedure by delivering a judgment which
reversed one of the Court of First Instance. This
judgment alleged as its authority Article 96 of our

THE PEOPLE 91

Constitution, which insists upon the publicity of
trials, " and because," says the judgment, " the
measures adopted by the German authorities make
this publicity a sham." The lesson was a bold one,
and it was understood.

More recently, the German Governor having issued,
in flagrant violation of the Hague Convention, two
decrees which affected the principles of our civil
legislation, the Council of the Order of Advocates
of Brussels, in a memorandum perfect in its reasoning
and tone and drawn up by M. Theodor, the President,
protested against this new violation of International
Law. The Governor threatened. The protest of
the Bar was no less firm.

In all ranks of society a similar dignified resistance
expresses the same patriotism. Side by side with
the clergy, our bourgeoisie exhibits an admirable
attitude, and at the same time the most accomplished
skill and the most energetic activity in those works
of consolidation and assistance which it has organized
everywhere.

It is the same with our industrial and working
populations. You know how profound is our indi-
gence. Belgium's busy hive of industry is con-
demned to idleness. No more exports, in a country
where seven-tenths of the industrial output, in
normal times, find their way abroad. Hardly any
means of transport exist. The whole youth of the
country is with the armies. Moreover, our spinning-
mills and our clothworks have seen the raw material

92 THE WAY OF HONOUR

requisitioned or stolen. From many factories the
machinery has been removed. Our miners are working
no more than three days a week at the maintenance
of the tunnels and the production of a little coal.
Our metal-workers earn seven to eight francs, not per
day but per week. German figures published on the
8th of May last give the number of our unemployed
as 742,234. Out of seven million Belgians still
in the country it is reckoned that more than three
millions — three millions, I say — are living upon
charity.

Yet these starving workmen might have work
and large wages if they chose. But they know that
from this work the enemy would profit, directly or
indirectly. That is enough reason for them to
refuse it. At Malines and Charleroi the Germans
have offered them as much as ten marks a day. But
our workmen do not seek bread at that price.
Abandoning the hope of winning them by the bait
of high wages, the invader now seeks to subdue their
spirit by threats and punishment.

Let me tell you — I could give you many other
instances of the kind — what happened at Luttre
a few weeks ago.

In this Hainault commune there is a workshop
of the Belgian State Railway. On the 23rd of March
last, the German authorities posted a notice in the
workrooms of this place which insisted upon the men
returning to work. On the 2ist of April two hundred
workmen were demanded. On the 2Qth of April

THE PEOPLE 93

soldiers came to requisition them in their houses
and brought them to the workshop. If any of
them were away from their homes, a member of
their family was arrested.

Nevertheless the workmen maintain their refusal
to work. They are not willing to co-operate in this
war against their country. They know, as does
every one in Belgium, that the trains which run
over our railway lines can only assist the German
Army in its operations against the armies of Belgium
and her Allies. They have on their side the definite
language of Article 54 of the Hague Convention,
which was — a bitter jest — proposed at the Second
Congress by the delegates of Germany.

What do our unscrupulous enemies do now ?

Not having at their disposal buildings sufficient
to imprison these obstinate workmen, they shut
them up, on the 3Oth of April, in railway carriages.
On the 4th of May, twenty-four of them are brought
before a court-martial at Mons and are charged
with having belonged to a secret society whose object
is to embarrass the execution of the military projects
of Germany. They are condemned to imprisonment.

On the 8th of May forty-eight workmen are sent
into Germany, God knows to what destination. On
the I4th of May, forty-five others meet with the same
fate. At their departure the entire population, massed
around the approaches to the station, acclaim these
brave fellows with cries of " Long live Belgium ! "
and they reply in the same words. Only a moment

94 THE WAY OF HONOUR

ago I have learnt that their comrades, who have in
spite of everything maintained their patriotic attitude,
are about to be embarked in their turn in railway
trucks and deported into an unknown country, far
from everything that is theirs — their wives, their
children and their homes. And why ? For not
having been willing to suffer Right to bow before
Force or to abandon their honour for the sake of
their interest.

Gentlemen, let us honour these " hard heads," as
Charles the Bold would have called them, these
modest but heroic workers who prefer to suffer
all things rather than that the Right should be
violated through them. In their spontaneous move-
ment of revolt we see reproduced and symbolized
the whole history of Belgium, that pathway of

Justice.

* * *

In every class of the population this steadfastness,
which nothing has been able or will be able to bend,
is accompanied by a deep scorn for those who have
built up in our midst so vast a structure of false-
hood, cowardice and cruelty. The Germans are so
simple as to be astonished at this circumstance.
Listen to what one of them writes. Dr. Richard
Bahr, who has been conducting some enquiries in
Belgium, says :

' What animates the Belgians is less a patriotic
grief than a cold hostility which is perpetually fed
from new sources.

THE PEOPLE 95

" In a cafe one cannot sit down beside them without
the painful feeling that disdain and hate have also
taken their places at table."

This scorn expresses itself in a kind of irony which
the Germans feel hovering everywhere around them.

Here the women excel.

The other day a young girl was walking along the
street in Liege, wearing the smart little policeman's
cap which our soldiers also wear. A recent notice
had forbidden the wearing of these caps. An official
rushed forward to tear off the proof of offence. " It's
easier to take than Calais, is it not, sir ? " said
the girl.

I like also this inspiration of a Flemish inn-
keeper, near Antwerp, above the door of whose
cafe was the sign, fairly common in our provinces,
In den Keyser, which is to say " To the Emperor."
This innkeeper contented himself with suppressing
one letter, the K, that is so dear to the Germans.
His cafe to-day is called In den Yser — " To the
Yser " — and this is by no means the same thing.

The street-boys of Brussels, the " Ketjes," as we
call them, cultivate a form of humour quite their
own. Some of these children — and you know what
is the favourite game of all children in these days —
were carrying out military manoeuvres in one of the
suburban squares of Brussels. In imitation of the
Germans, they had pushed up through their little
caps certain sharp-pointed carrots, so as to simulate
as well as they could the pointed German helmet. - ~\

96 THE WAY OF HONOUR

Then with all solemnity, under the command of the
eldest amongst them, they performed the " parade-
marsch," that grotesque " goose-step " which is one
of the gems of German military scientific dis-
covery. Some soldiers and officers stood watching
this boyish performance and smiling. Suddenly
the leader of the small band, turning round as he
marched, gave his men, in a trumpet voice, the
order " Nach Paris ! " And instantly the boys
with the same mechanical movement continued their
" goose-step," but now it was faster and carried them
backwards. The German audience laughed no longer
and the Ketjes took flight like so many sparrows.

I lose time, perhaps, in telling you of these incidents,
which give us a little respite from horror and blood-
shed. Yet permit me to tell you of still another, of
the truth of which I have been assured by one of my
friends who himself witnessed it. The town of Bruges
has for its Mayor an old gentleman, eighty years of
age, the Count de Bocarme. He is one of the doyens
of our House of Representatives and enjoys the well-
earned respect of every one. When the Germans
entered Bruges, he waited for them at his post,
dignified and ready for everything that might happen.
The German officers questioned him brutally, with
their revolvers pointed under his nose by way of
argument. " Your pardon, gentlemen," said the
Count, whose manners possess the charm of the
old regime. " You are the stronger here. If you
please, you can make me a prisoner. You can, if

THE PEOPLE 97

you please, have me shot. But, having regard to
my age and position, I insist that everything be done
with civility."

Is there not to be discovered in this delicious
incident the whole contrast between Kultur and that
simple dignity of heart and spirit by which among
yourselves and among us a civilized man is recognized ?

Although free from the note of tragedy, this scene
exhibits no less of the same moral quality than do
the many other brave deeds which grow daily in
number and which condemnations and executions
only succeed in multiplying.

The Germans can make nothing of it. Listen to
this, from the Neues Stuttgarter Tagezeitung :

" There exists in Belgium a sort of falsely conceived
heroism which drives people to commit extravagant
actions, in spite of the real danger to which they
thereby become exposed ; for instance, attempting
to get to the front through the battle-lines, assisting
escaped soldiers, spying, etc.

" The German authorities," the newspaper con-
tinues, " have been compelled to pronounce the
severest penalties against such delinquents ; but, in
spite of this, in spite of the increasing number of
death-sentences, it would seem that not yet has a
means been discovered of impressing certain minds
with fear."

Precisely ! And the more tyranny asserts itself,
the stronger will Belgium's resistance grow.

Endurer pour durer, " Endure that you may last."
7

98 THE WAY OF HONOUR

This motto, which in the sixteenth century was
that of Cardinal Granville, Archbishop of Malines,
may be applied to-day to Belgium as a whole.

Neither the cruelty of an- enemy without shame
nor his shady tricks will get the better of this patriotic
endurance. It will not end save with the liberation
of our soil and the complete acknowledgment of
our rights.

I have quoted — and I ask pardon for it — the
language of some German wiseacre or other, some
scribbler of to-day. Listen now to the words which
a poet of former times has put into the mouth of
oppressed Belgium :

" Liberty marches before me, her feet stained
with blood, and the streaming folds of her robe soiled
with blood.

" All this blood shall not have flowed in vain.
Courage, brave people ! The God of Victory is
your guide. As we see the ocean burst its barriers,
so must the tyrant be broken and hurled down,
and driven forth from the land that he has in his
insolence usurped."

The poet who speaks thus to us is neither a
Belgian nor a Frenchman. It is Goethe, who wrote
these lines in the last scene of his fine drama,
Egmont.

That one German, at any rate, understood us. And
it is because she is all filled with those sentiments
of courage and independence which Goethe has so
nobly expressed that Belgium, bleeding but proud

wh

THE PEOPLE 99

to stand fast for the Right, shall drive forth the
tyrants and the perjurers from her land, which in
their insolence they are to-day usurping.

THE DUTIES OF EXILE

A Speech delivered on the 22nd of June 1915, at
the General Meeting of Belgian Groups in the
Midlands, at the City Hall, Manchester.

MR. CHAIRMAN, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, —

In thanking me as you have done you have re-
versed our positions, for it is rather I that should
tell you of the lively gratitude which I owe you
for the reception which I have met with at your
hands, and for the good cheer which it has brought
to my heart. It is well during these stimulating
but painful hours through which we are passing,
scattered as we are and absorbed in various forms
of work for our common cause — it is well for us
Belgians, I say, to see one another, to meet one
another frequently, and to impregnate ourselves
with that spirit of fellowship which is born of our
hopes and our activities.

It is a piece of our Fatherland which I find here.
In these Belgian groups which we are discovering,
one after the other, some large, others very small,
in England, France, Holland, Switzerland, and else-
where, one perceives as it were the fragments of

ioo THE WAY OF HONOUR

a mirror which for a time has been smashed to bits.
And each of these fragments, within its own limits,
preserves for us and reflects for us the image of
our whole country.

But the magnificent meeting of this evening is
an unusual one in that it presents to my honourable
friend Count Goblet d'Alviella and myself that
image of the Fatherland framed, or rather enshrined,
in the hospitality and friendship of a great and
famous English city. With what pleasure we find
ourselves permitted to greet and thank with all our
hearts, among the leading men who have been so
kind as to be with us this evening, the Lord Mayor
of Manchester, so distinguished for his devotion to
our cause, Sir Daniel McCabe, and the illustrious
Bishop of Salford, Mgr. Casartelli, a proved friend
of Belgium, whose memory the University of Louvain
cherishes with a peculiar pride.

Led by these gentlemen and stimulated by their
example, an entire population exhausts its ingenuity
in providing for the Belgians who have sought
refuge within this great industrial region all the
elements and consolations of an honourable and
useful life.

History tells us that during the Middle Ages the
Aldermen of Bruges, when they received into their
city an English king who there awhile sought shelter,
addressed him in the following words : ' Your
Majesty cannot be unaware that the soil of Flanders
is common to all men, no matter where they were

THE PEOPLE 101

born." By a curious turn of the wheel of Destiny,
we find ourselves to-day the guests of a glorious
Empire, upon which the sun never sets and where
we discern once more, in the reception of King
George and his loyal subjects as in the policy
of Mr. Asquith and Sir Edward Grey, those tradi-
tions of faithful and generous friendship to which
we have been habituated by the great statesmen
of England, such as Palmerston and Gladstone.

Yes, Belgium is scattered. Yes, she is suffering
unheard-of sorrows. And yet, she has never lived
in the hearts of her children and in the conscience
of mankind with a life more intense, more united,
more shining and more noble.

But when we speak of a scattered nation, there
is one sense in which we must qualify our words.
Those Belgians of the inner and outer world, as they
have been called, you know very well where they
find their common meeting-ground, whither their
thoughts run, and where our devotion must always
follow them.

It is in our battle-lines ; it is in the midst of our
Army, whose glorious gaps are filled each day by a
stream of new recruits ; it is in that calm and pure
atmosphere of courage and confidence which sur-
rounds our soldiers, yes, every one of them, in spite
of the fogs of the Yser and the clouds of the
asphyxiating gas.

102 THE WAY OF HONOUR

It is there, to that inviolate corner of our land,
that we must always turn if we are to seize the
true meaning of things, to stimulate our energies
and to strengthen our sacred unity for the fight
and for liberation.

Separated as we are from this Belgium Militant
by a curtain of flame, we perceive, through the
fumes of smoke and blood, Belgium the Captive.
She stands there erect, like the Madonna, her breast
pierced by the sword of every form of wrong : the
sword of perjury, the sword of treason, the sword
of massacre, the sword of pillage, the sword of base-
ness, the sword of slander. But, stronger than all
her torments, she holds her head high and unstained,
her eyes speak her serene confidence in the Eternal
Justice, while with her foot she crushes the reptile
that would soil her with its slime.

And here, free of the weight of the yoke, but
exiled and longing for her home, we see Belgium
the Wanderer, that Belgium of five or six hundred
thousand refugees who have been scattered through-
out the world. Their life, for the past ten months,
has had also its heroisms to show, and this life
entails upon those who live it certain duties, all
its own, concerning which you will not, I think, be
surprised if I speak to you for a few moments.

How admirable it was, when upon our little country,
which in its simplicity had believed in the worth

THE PEOPLE 103

of treaties and which had accepted as the very
foundation of its national existence a sort of servi-
tude, which, imposed upon it by the general interest,
ought to have assured to it, in return for a certain
abandonment of its diplomatic status, the security
of that existence — when upon this little country the
outrageous ultimatum of the 2nd of August burst
like a thunderclap in a calm sky — how wonderful
it was to see this whole nation, where party struggles
were so bitter, rise like one man to the situation.
In truth, I shall never forget, and not one of those
who were present will ever forget, that tragic night
when, in the Palace at Brussels, under the presidency
of the King, we decided upon the terms of our reply
to Germany. While we were leaving the Palace, the
first rays of the dawn were lighting up the Park,
and already from the poorer quarters of the town
was rising that confused rumour which proclaims
the resumption of work that has been for a
while suspended. Who, I ask you, among that
laborious and peaceful populace, suspected the
tragedy that was preparing ? How would that
crowd, as much attached to its easy way of living
as to its habits of free criticism, accept the news
of the ultimatum and of the reply which the King's
Government had given to it ? How would it face
the terrible consequences which that reply was
about to bring upon it ?

Ah ! what a fine people, greater than any one
amongst us had imagined ! In all that crowd there

104 THE WAY OF HONOUR

was not a moment's hesitation, nor doubt as to
what duty demanded.

No one who did not witness the spectacle which
Brussels presented on the 4th of August knows what
the awakening of a people means. Suddenly the
whole nation knew itself, and the efforts of long
ago made by our ancestors against the oppression
of the foreigner revived at a stroke in the enthusiasm
of a patriotism the ardour of which that nation
itself had never suspected.

What epic scenes were those ! Early in the
morning the King, in his field uniform, rode on
horseback to the Parliament House. His passage
was acclaimed by every voice ; every arm was
stretched out towards him, as if to approve and
encourage his actions. Every eye burned with a
deep and proud resolve.

Within the Palais de la Nation, in that Chamber
which has so often echoed to our debates and our
quarrels, ministers, senators, deputies, the night
before still so divided, all of us suddenly perceived
that we had but one mind. Grave and thoughtful,
mastering their emotion, all took their places. The
Queen and the young Princes were in our midst.

Through the windows of the Palace, which open
upon the Square, came to our ears the waves of
cheering which accompanied the progress of the
King. We heard them grow nearer and louder.
And when the King entered the room, spontaneously
our common soul broke out, in its turn, into an
enthusiastic ovation.

THE PEOPLE 105

Then the King spoke, in a clear, grave voice, the
voice of a leader of men. He spoke of our duty
and our rights. He counselled a calm but steadfast
courage and the close union of all the Belgian people.
He reminded us of the deeds of our fathers of 1830.
He praised the Army and the enthusiasm of the
young men who, at that very moment, were crowding
in their thousands into the recruiting depots. He
took God to witness that our cause was just. He
asked the representatives of the nation if the nation
was ready, as he himself was ready, for every effort,
for every sacrifice, in the defence of the sacred
heritage of independence. Who shall tell the beauty
of the oath in which those men — and not one of them
could cherish the smallest illusion with regard to
the weakness of our arms when confronted by the
most formidable military organization in the world
— echoed the oath of their King ! Who shall tell
the sacred emotion which thrilled us all at once to
the core of our beings, when at a quarter to eleven
Baron de Broquevilie, ascending the tribune, an-
nounced, without a word of comment, " Gentlemen,
I regret to inform the Chamber that the frontier
has been crossed " ! Who shall tell the splendour of
those war measures — improvised laws — which were
discussed, drawn up, voted hastily but calmly, while
already in the districts of Verviers and Herve the
brutal gallop of the Uhlans was scattering behind
the hoofs of their horses all those liberties which
we had worshipped and kept safe !

106 THE WAY OF HONOUR

After that day, while our Army pursued its super-
human task ; while before Liege it confronted the
German Colossus, and while during five days the
resistance of the forts of Liege kept him in check
and defeated all his schemes ; while at Eghezee and
Haelen and Diest it defended our soil, foot by foot ;
while it risked itself in daring sorties from Antwerp
and thus collaborated in the victory of the Marne —
after that day, all along the highways of our country,
behind the Army and upon its flanks, was seen
streaming through the fields, where the crops still
stood unharvested, the endless exodus of those
townspeople and villagers who had been hunted
from their homes. To see them pass by in their
long lines was to see once again the pictures of
Laermans : poor souls, whose sullen faces reflected
their visions of blood and fire, carrying on their
backs a few wretched bundles, dragging their
broken boots along the stones of the roads, leading
by the hand weeping children or pressing to their
breasts babies that slept. But all, in those hours
of utter bewilderment, and since then in their exile,
where we find them again to-day, suffer their lot
without complaint, because they know themselves
to be without reproach. And there is not one
amongst them, no matter how wretched he may
be, who, thinking of the noble ideal for which he is
suffering, is not ready to say with the poet :

Je le ferais encore si j'avais d le faire.

THE PEOPLE 107

Without doubt they are suffering, these poor
souls, just as we are, whose families have been
decimated and scattered, whose homes have been
burned or pillaged. But — let us admit it — there
is in our suffering a kind of bitter luxury in being
able to oppose to the brutalities of a dishonoured
foe the calm resistance of a conscience that has
no remorse, to refuse to falsehood the power to
masquerade as truth, or to usurpation the right
to legitimize offences against the moral freedom of
the human race.

Right is greater than Might. This is the lesson
which our beloved land teaches to all the world,
and which, if we will, shall assure to her, at the same
time, that immortal prestige which is ours to-day
and all the material reparation and compensations
which victory will bring.

If we will. That is to say, if we continue to do
our whole duty, all of us, each in his own station,
soldiers and civilians, men and women, Belgians
who have stayed at home and Belgians who have
escaped into exile.

Success depends not only upon military operations.
It will depend also upon the behaviour of all our
citizens, yes, of every one of them, no matter how
modest his station may be.

" But what can we do in exile ? " I am asked now
and then. Before all else, we can remain worthy
of our cause. You are proud of being Belgians.
See to it that Belgium shall be proud of you ! Do

io8 THE WAY OF HONOUR

nothing that may lessen the moral value of our
participation in the war.

The union of all around our King and those who
bear the responsibility of directing, at his side, the
destinies of the country — this I need not recommend
to you. It exists in every Belgian heart.

But I say this to you all : To work ! Let all
those who can, serve in the ranks of the Army. Let
all the rest help our soldiers. Let no single talent
remain buried.

To you who have hands, I say : Prepare before
all else food, clothing, and munitions. It is by the
thousands of tons that the armies of to-day call for
shells. There is, than this, no work more urgent
after that of our soldiers, of which it is the condition
precedent and wrhich it alone can prolong.

To you who have leisure, I say : Replace those
who are fighting, not to supplant them, but to take
their places in the work whose interruption may
endanger the nation's life.

To you who have money — if there are any such
among the Belgians — I say : Bring to the Treasury
the sinews of war.

To you who have science, I say : Bring to the
fight the benefit of your discoveries and your
inventions.

To you women, I say : Nurse and heal our
wounded, sew, knit, mend.

To you priests, I say : Console those who mourn,
raise up those who fail in the struggle.

THE PEOPLE 109

To you who can speak and write, I say : Spread
everywhere the truth, explain the causes of our
conduct and of our confidence, repel slander, stimulate
courage.

When she became aware of the indignation aroused
in every honourable heart by her violation of that
Belgian neutrality which she had sworn to protect,
understanding that she had been guilty not only
of a crime but of a blunder also, Germany sought
to mislead public opinion.

In order to seem white himself, Cain attempted to
blacken Abel. One of the fathers of German Kultur,
Frederick II, once said : " Whatever I do, I shall
find a pedant to justify me." Wilhelm II has found
ninety-three of them. They have signed, if they did
not draw it up, that truly colossal document, the
Manifesto of the Intellectuals. Since then, with an
obstinacy which nothing can abash, the agents and
sub-agents of the German propaganda have exerted
themselves, in the most serious fashion, to make us
believe that Belgium, previous to the German mani-
festo, had failed in the duties which her neutrality
imposed upon her.

Listen, for instance, to what Dr. Dernburg had
the audacity to write in the newspapers of America :
" In so far as the conquest of Belgium is concerned,
it has been won by the blood of Germans, and that
country can never be restored so long as it shall be
under the political control of England."

Assuredly these German reptiles know well that

no THE WAY OF HONOUR

Belgium, who, before the war, was the friend of all
the Powers, was neither the vassal nor the ally of
any one of them. They know with what jealous
care the Belgian Government watched over its duties
as a neutral, and this to such a degree that on the
2nd of August 1914, a few hours before the delivery
of the German ultimatum, it caused a Brussels
newspaper to be seized because it had printed in
the margin of one of its numbers : " Long live France !
Down with the German Barbarian ! " Those who
prepared that ultimatum, Herr von Bethmann
Hollweg and Herr von Jagow, were forced them-
selves to admit our complete loyalty. Even up to
the night of the 3rd of August, of the four advance-
guard divisions of the Belgian Army, but one con-
fronted Germany. The others watched our frontiers
to the south and along the sea coast. By publishing
the diplomatic documents which they stole from the
archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at Brussels,
the Germans have succeeded in proving that we had
but one anxiety — that we should remain just as
independent of England and France as of Germany.
Of all these documents, that which they have most
craftily exploited, after having begun by mutilating
its text, is a note of General Ducarne, Chief of the
Belgian Staff, concerning an interview which he had
in 1906 with Lieutenant-Colonel Barnardiston,
English Military Attache. Well, what did this note
say ? It showed that the Belgian Staff, without
otherwise taking any step or coming to any decision,

THE PEOPLE in

had listened to the English Attache's exposition of
a vague sketch of the proposed eventual assistance
which England, in her capacity of guarantor, might
send to Belgium " Might send." And when ?
Under what conditions ? The note stated it clearly :
" After the violation of our neutrality by Germany."
And the pharisees of Kultur tore their clothing
and cried : " What need of witnesses ! Belgium has
uttered blasphemy ! It is she who has violated her
own neutrality ! " It is not without humour that
Lloyd George has compared this language of Germany
to that of a footpad who, having assassinated a
peaceful citizen, should thereupon display, in justi-
fication of his crime, a letter found upon the body
of his victim in which that person stated his inten-
tion of appealing to the police in case he should
be assaulted. It is precisely the same case. And
Germany assuredly knows it. But her stubborn
energy exerts itself in striving to make the wrorld
believe the contrary, so that the opinion of neutral
countries may be led astray. It is in her methods
of propaganda, no less than in her methods of war,
that this unscrupulous Power seems to show her
anxiety to justify more and more the severe judg-
ment which Lord Curzon has passed upon her by
calling her " the Mad Dog of Europe." As for us,
we shall never weary of opposing to this stream of
poisonous slime and bloody froth all the simplicity,
purity and beauty of a Belgium who has always
remained faithful to her duty. We have paid dearly

ii2 THE WAY OF HONOUR

enough for that fidelity, thank God ! not to allow
a reputation for honesty which we value above all
else to be undermined.

Another useful way, gentlemen, of employing our
time is to take thought for the morrow by preparing
for the material re-establishment of our country.

We were surprised by the war. Let us not be
surprised by peace.

Belgium is an ant-hill. The boot of the Barbarian
has overturned it. It is ours to build it up again.
And for this it will not be enough to have a number
of particular and selfish projects. What is wanted
is a general programme. It will not be enough to
have our individual goodwills. We must have Will.

And you will not be surprised if, in a city wherein
economic considerations bulk so largely, I consider,
for a short while, the consequences of the war from
this point of view. The industrial effort of the
German Empire had attained of recent years, in
spite of frequent crises, astounding proportions.
This country, which in 1870 counted scarcely forty
millions of inhabitants, sufficed in 1905 for the needs
of sixty millions. Hamburg had caught up Liverpool,
outstripped Antwerp and Rotterdam, and had left
Marseilles and Genoa far behind. The figure of
exports, which in 1890 was less than nine milliards
of francs, had bounded to fourteen milliards in twelve
years. The German banks and steamship companies

THE PEOPLE 113

spread their network over the entire world. German
colonists and commercial travellers flooded the ends
of the earth, and notably South America. After
having set foot firmly in Africa, Germany had
strengthened her position in the Pacific by the
acquisition of the Carolines and the Mariannes.
Established at Chan-Tung, she awaited her moment
for stretching out her hand upon China. Turkey
she had brought into a sort of vassalage to herself,
and the Sultan had conceded to her, before the war,
the railways of Konia-Bagdad-Bassorah, which
were to open to her and place in her power the
marvellous plain of Mesopotamia.

This favourable situation Germany owed in great
part to her customs treaties. By forcing the van-
quished, through its famous Article II, to concede
the clause of the most favoured nation, the Treaty
of Frankfort of the loth of May 1871 had led
France little by little to the adoption of a Pro-
tectionist policy, whose repercussion could not but
affect in Germany's favour the markets of the
other nations. And thus it came about that
customs tariffs and surcharges raised a veritable
wall between us and our southern neighbours.

Later, from Russia, in compensation for her
neutrality during the Japanese War, Germany had
obtained a preferential tariff. Dare I, in this City
Hall of Manchester, add that she owned to finding
some profit also in English Free Trade ? Finally, we
observe more and more clearly visible her design to

8

H4 THE WAY OF HONOUR

draw Austria-Hungary within the bounds of a vast
centralized Customs Union, which again should
develop for her all the advantages of a privileged
situation. She would also further increase her
interior trade in order the better to export her
surplus products at an insignificant price.

In order to put a check upon these boundless
ambitions, the programme which we shall have to
conceive in common will include no doubt measures
both temporary and permanent.

When the war is over, Belgium, the North of
France and Poland will have seen many of their
factories destroyed, many of them, at least, robbed
of their machinery and of their stocks of raw material.
Time will be required to renew these stocks, to
procure new machinery, and to repair the buildings.
Many months, years perhaps, must pass in this way
before those factories recover their former activity.
On the other hand, the German factories will remain
uninjured, since, even if the Allies should penetrate
into the heart of Germany, they will not practise
the official pillage which our enemies know so well
how to organize. While many of our workers must
remain paralysed, all the German workshops will
stand from day to day ready to recommence oper-
ations. Freed of certain among their rivals, they
will meet even with increased facilities. They will
again make of us their tributaries, and will again
impose their goods upon the remotest markets.
Germany, conquered, will thus procure for herself

THE PEOPLE 115

an instant revenge, while awaiting the moment when
her recovery of her conquests in the commerce of
the world and the reawakening of her pride, that
for a moment has been subdued, provoke within
fifteen or twenty years a renewal of the bloody
struggle.

This would be monstrous. It is not to be thought
of that criminals should enrich themselves at the
cost of their victims. In order to ensure peace for
the future, it is vital that, so soon as the storm
shall have passed by, all the peoples who have
bowed beneath it shall quickly recover their normal
existence. To this indemnities will contribute.

But independently of this immediate anxiety, by
what efforts may we hope definitely to establish that
economic balance which will be an essential factor
in the continuance of peace ?

Must not such efforts take their inspiration from
that same sacred understanding which to-day has
associated against Prussian Militarism all these
nations whose economic capacities are so different,
but who will find in the very variety of their
aptitudes a greater ease in co-ordinating their
activities ?

No one deceives himself into supposing that the
German nation, even if it is brought to the dust,
will not begin again to work, to produce and to sell.
No one can reasonably dream of organizing against
Germany any lasting boycott. But to prevent her
from taking a revenge of commercial diplomacy upon

n6 THE WAY OF HONOUR

her too confident conquerors, would it not be well,
without affecting in any way the sovereignty of any
Allied State, to compare the conditions of manu-
facture which exist in each one of them, to deter-
mine the part which each shall assume in the future
economic and maritime efforts and to reserve to
each the corresponding advantages ? Will it not be
possible for each more largely to open to its Allies
its outlets, its markets and its contracts ? Will not
commercial treaties and arrangements between the
Allies with , regard to legislation, transport, postal
communication and exchange be both possible and
valuable ? Can we not, in a word, realize the com-
binations necessary to surround the business men of
the friendly nations with better conditions in so far
as their competition with an unscrupulous enemy is
concerned ?

Let our scientific men and our men of affairs,
whether they have remained in Belgium or taken
refuge in foreign countries, study from now onwards
these problems of reparation, policy and defence.
The economic enquiry which the Belgian Govern-
ment has instituted will make such a task easier
for them.

Shall I add, for them and for all of us, that they
will find in their exile a duty as well as a reward
in taking cognizance not only of the qualities of
initiative, loyalty and sanity which characterize the
Anglo-Saxon race, but also of the warlike virtues of
that race, so slow to move, but so jealous of its

THE PEOPLE 117

liberties, and so faithful to its engagements, and
which is endowed, like Endymion, one of Disraeli's
heroes, with so marvellous a " pluck," a courage so
stubborn and a capacity to wait so prodigious.

A capacity to wait ! Let us not deceive ourselves
about that.

In the present war, so different from those of
other days, it is not likely that either of the rival
coalitions will, in any short time, force the end in
its own favour by one of those military strokes
which, at a blow, beat the enemy to the earth.
The forces that are opposed are too formidable,
and the extent of territory over which about
fifteen millions of men face one another is too
great, for us to be able to look, perhaps for a
very long time, for that decisive military success
which, by itself, shall still the hurricane. It
would seem much more likely that it will be by
a slow process, continuous and methodical, that
weakness will overtake and attrition undermine,
little by little, the system of military, naval,
economic and financial forces against which the
Allies are fighting, until the huge mass ends by
tottering to its fall.

It is for this reason that we have need of a
strong will, calm and indomitable, always equal to
itself, to carry on the struggle so long as it
shall be necessary. And this tenacity, which our
military leaders and our soldiers understand so
well, is no less necessary for each of the non-

n8 THE WAY OF HONOUR

combatants, since it is the sum of all its individual
wills which makes the moral force of a nation.

And it is for this reason that each one of us must
militarize his resolve.

An Italian statesman, Signor Barzilai, lately
published, in a form whose humour cannot disguise
its wisdom, what he called The Commandments of
the Civilian. The words which stood at the head
of this little work were those which should inspire
our General Staffs : Effort, Confidence, Patience.

Patience for the wives and the anxious, weeping
mothers who know nothing, who long, yet are almost
afraid to know.

Patience for the girls, sighing at their needlework.

Patience for the children who see the tear starting
to the eye, to whom one says nothing, yet who
divine everything.

Patience for all those who write letters that are
never answered.

Patience for the men who have been torn up by
their roots and are pulled here and there by contrary
duties. Patience for those who are tormented by
the ambitions of politics or the itch to criticize.

Patience for those who say too much and reflect
not enough.

Patience for those whom the length of the trial
offends, for those who by the seeming futility of
the military reports are wearied, for those whose

THE PEOPLE 119

courage falters beneath the breath of a hasty or
selfish speech.

And patience for all those who would have Peace.

Here and there, of recent months, voices have
been raised which speak of peace, and in many of
these it is possible for an experienced ear to recognize
the Teutonic accent. It is not at the moment when
the burglar is about to be thrown out of the house
where he has committed his crime that it is proper
to talk of peace. The agents of peace, in such a
case are the " policemen/' that is to say, the good
soldiers of the Belgian and Allied armies.

It has been said of genius that it is no more than
a long patience. In the titanic conflict of to-day,
we may say the same thing of success. He who
first loses patience will be the vanquished. But
the final result will be that which the most optimistic
of us desire, if we all, civilians and soldiers alike,
know how to keep our endurance and to do, each
in his own sphere, be it great or small, his duty.

A few weeks ago I found myself at Poperinghe.
An epidemic of typhoid fever, which to-day has
fortunately been stamped out, was ravaging the
population of this Flemish canton, so close to un-
happy Ypres. A hospital had been improvised
there to nurse the sick. During my visit I was
taken into an attic where upon a poor truckle-bed
lay a young nun. While nursing the sick, and in
spite of all precautions which she had taken, she
had been bitten in the finger by a delirious patient.

120 THE WAY OF HONOUR

Her arm, infected by the poison, was nothing but
a monstrous mass of flesh covered with sores. They
had meditated amputation, but already it had been
considered to be too late for it. As I congratulated
her, and told her that she deserved our admiration
just as much as our soldiers who, but a short dis-
tance away, were setting out for the trenches, she
replied, with a smile upon her young, angelic face,
where already there hovered a threatening shadow :
" One does what one can, Monsieur le Ministre,
doesn't one ? "

If each of us did truly what he could, I do not
say that victory and reparation would be near.
Perhaps we shall have to struggle and suffer for a
long time still. But I say that they are certain.

Armed with a courage and a patience that will
never weaken, confident in the loyalty of our noble
Allies, let us await our destiny with a serene faith.
The hour moves onwards slowly upon the dial of
Justice. But it moves surely. As it is written in
the ninety-first Psalm : "A thousand shall fall at
thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand ; but
it shall not come nigh thee. Only with thine eye
shalt thou behold and see the reward of the wicked."

ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE TRENCHES

ON the nth of March 1916, in the great amphitheatre
of the Sorbonne, under the presidency of M. Paul
Deschanel, President of the Chamber of Deputies,

THE PEOPLE 121

and in the presence of the President of the Republic,
the Ambassadors and Ministers of the friendly
and Allied Powers, and of the representatives of
all the Public Offices, the Alliance Franco-Beige
held an important demonstration in honour of
Belgium.

On the platform round M. Deschanel were seated :
M. Denys Cochin, Minister of State ; M. Justin
Godard, Under-Secretary of State ; M. Carton de
Wiart, Minister of Justice ; Baron Beyens, Minister
for Foreign Affairs ; MM. Vandervelde, Minister of
State ; Barthou, Deputy and formerly President of
the Council ; Steeg, Senator, formerly Minister, and
President of the Alliance Franco-Beige ; Klobukowski,
Minister of France at Brussels ; Baron Guillaume,
Minister of Belgium at Paris ; Delanney, Prefect of
the Seine ; Mithouard, President of the Municipal
Council of Paris ; and Laurent, Prefect of Police.

To the speeches of the President of the Chamber
of Deputies and of the President of the Alliance
Franco-Beige, M. Carton de Wiart replied in the
following address :

MR. PRESIDENT, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, —

Our first words must be words of thanks. It is
our duty. It is also our greatest desire.

On that sad evening in October 1914 when the
Belgian Government and its fortunes came to land
at Havre-de-Grace, the President of the French
Republic responded in these words to the respectful

122 THE WAY OF HONOUR

sentiments which I had the honour to address to him
on behalf of my colleagues :

" We were, in virtue of treaties into which we
had entered, guarantors of the neutrality of Belgium,
and we are not of those who disavow their signatures.
But the heroism of your nation and the blood which
we have shed in common have made our duty still
more sacred, and we will fulfil it to the end with all
the warmth of a brotherly friendship."

A brotherly friendship ! How we experience it,
how we feel it ! How we see it all around us !

From the head of the State and Government of
the Republic it has spread to France in her entirety.
Growing as our sacrifices have grown, it exhausts
itself in the service of our soldiers, our refugees and
our captive compatriots, in the exertion of an
ingenious generosity, of which the Alliance Franco-
Beige, under the devoted and unwearied leadership of
M. Steeg, presents one of the most stimulating aspects.

It is this and this alone which explains that appar-
ently paradoxical phenomenon which has existed
since October 1914, and of which the history of
International Law knows no example : a State
enshrined, as it were, in the territory of another
State ; a Government which continues to direct,
from the land in which it has found an asylum and
a shelter, the whole pathetic existence of a nation
that is defending itself ; a legitimate authority en-
suring from outside the unity of will and hope
among seven million Belgians, some with the colours,

THE PEOPLE 123

others prisoners of the enemy, others scattered
throughout the world, watching over the interests
of each one of these people, defeating all hostile
manoeuvres, preparing for the restoration of a
country that lies in ruins — and all this without its
full independence and its complete sovereignty
having ever had to encounter so much as the
suspicion of a hindrance.

This brotherly friendship was solemnly affirmed,
hardly a month ago, by the Declaration de Sainte-
Adresse, which honours at the same time France
and the other Allied Powers — England, Russia,
Italy and Japan. And now here at this moment
it is expressed in the reception which we have been
given by this imposing assembly, wherein the visage
of France is, as it were, reflected. And finally it
is this friendship which has wished — and for my
part I find myself strangely embarrassed by it —
that our Belgian voices should be associated in the
Sorbonne with certain of those voices of which the
oratory and letters of France are so justly proud,
with those of the statesmen whom before the war
we admired for their far-seeing patriotism — friends
of peace, but still more of the country's honour.
Since the war began we see their energies and in-
fluence employed each day upon the disciplining
of the public spirit and contributing thus to the
strengthening of that armour of courage and
tenacity which, in the eyes of the world, makes
France to-day fairer than she has ever been before.

124 THE WAY OF HONOUR

Ladies and gentlemen, let us have no doubt about
it. These friendly voices which have been raised
and have answered one another beneath this echoing
vault, and the approval which your sympathy ex-
tended towards them, will have an effect that will
travel far and beneficially. Their echoes will be
carried among all the scattered groups of Belgium
Dispersed. It will sound in the ears of Belgium in
Arms. Three hundred kilometres away, in our
trenches by the Yser, it will carry our affectionate
greeting to our dear soldiers — always so far from
their own friends, always so near to death — whose
endurance and energy are at this very moment
stimulated and exalted by the exploits of your
soldiers at Verdun, to whom now I offer the ex-
pression of our boundless admiration.

But this echo will be heard farther still. It will
cross the battle-lines. Beyond the trenches, across
the zone of flame and of blood, it will travel even
so far as that invaded Belgium which our tender
love calls up before us each day under the image
of a mother, captive and outraged.

She is listening ; never doubt it. Every ear is
stretched, quivering, to hear what the wind from
France shall bring. I know the joy which our
brothers in the invaded territory, your com-
patriots and ours — for their fortunes are united
there as are ours here — feel when, filtering through
the lies by which the unscrupulous foe seeks to
stupefy and deceive them, come the sound and the

THE PEOPLE 125

meaning of voices which they love, to assure them
that our confidence, our unity and our courage are
the equal of their courage, their unity and their
confidence. I know, too, with what gladness their
eyes, searching the western horizon, mark along it
the coming of our scouting aeroplanes and see,
floating above their desolate cities, the two tri-
colours, yours and ours, like the promise of a
quick deliverance. And the throb of those motors
in the sky echoes in their hearts like the very
heartbeats of our free country.

Ah ! let us not hide ourselves from those eyes
over yonder. Let us not distrust those ears. And
since you have to-day placed this platform at the
service of the Belgian Government, permit me, in
its name, to say to the Belgians who are in captivity
how loyal is its anxiety for them and how warm is
its admiration. I say it to all : to those Members of
Parliament, to those Mayors, those Aldermen, whose
proud hearts day by day confront fines, imprison-
ment and deportation — to those magistrates who
have stayed at their posts and have never ceased
to administer justice, in full independence, in the
name of the King of the Belgians — to that Bar
which never bends its neck — to that Clergy whose
patriotism and courage are worthy (and to say
this is to say all) of our great Cardinal of Malines —
to those professors who, deaf to all clumsy attempts
at seduction, refuse to open their lecture-rooms,
scorning to serve a science that is enslaved.

126 THE WAY OF HONOUR

And how can I fail to seize this occasion, when I
stand in this place, this ancient and venerable
Sorbonne, which has always been as it were the
brain of France, of paying my tribute to that Univer-
sity of Louvain, younger sister of the University of
Paris — a younger sister, already aged but little less
than five centuries of a lofty and noble civilization,
and martyred to-day by a race which imagines
itself to be learned ! Permit me here to salute
those many stout patriots who daily risk their lives
in their endeavours to join our Army and to take
their place in its ranks. Let us also salute those men
of business, manufacturers and merchants, who face
ruin uncomplainingly, nay more, openly rejoice at
each new fall in the value of the mark. ' Yet,"
says the Frankfurter Zeitung, candidly enough, while
it waxes wroth over these manifestations of pleasure —
" Yet they ought to wish the mark to retain all its
value, since it is in marks that all payments are made
to them." Let us salute those workmen who, sooner
than set their hands to work from which the enemy
might profit, refuse high wages and suffer hunger.
A day came when, irritated by this resistance, the
tyrant dragged them one by one from their wives
and children and threw them into railway trucks
to be deported into the centre of Germany. And
as the train carried them away, they sang to cheer
their weeping families, they sang in the teeth of
their savage gaolers, the Brabangonne and the
Marseillaise. Ah, the brave fellows ! All are of

THE PEOPLE 127

one mind, rich and poor, men and women, clergy
and laymen, Flemings and Walloons ; for the same
sufferings and the same resistance to the same
enemy have made still more intimate the inter-
penetration of these two Belgian groups, whose
courage and rights are one, and whose union is the
basis of our very nationality.

When a hive all humming with industrious
activity — such as was Belgium before the war — is
suddenly attacked by an enemy, however formidable,
instantly the bees abandon their work upon their
wax and honey. With every sting thrust out, they
rush together against the enemy, their Queen in
the front rank. In the same way, at the moment
of invasion, our national community drew itself
together around its leader.

With what courage 'our young Army faced, upon
the heights of Liege, the best trained, the best
equipped, the most formidable host that the world
has seen ; with what tireless ardour it defended,
step by step, the national soil against the barbarian
invasion and victoriously arrested it upon the banks
of Yser, others have told and will tell. For my
part, I beg the friends of Belgium never to distin-
guish, in that sympathy and gratitude which they so
generously offer to us, between the courage of our
people and that of our soldiers. The line of trenches
which forbids them to live together does not prevent
them from thinking alike. And when we think of
it, is it not, upon that side as upon this, really the

128 THE WAY OF HONOUR

same form of courage, that new courage — revealed
by this war — which gains in depth and moral beauty
all that it loses in prestige and fame ? One may
express it in one word : " Steadfastness." Whether
we are " steadfast " here, as are our soldiers, fixed as
it were forever in one spot, surrounded by fog, mud
and ruins, exposed each moment to fumes and gases
which poison each mouthful of the air they breathe,
to bullets, shrapnel, bombs, grenades, and the shells
which tear them to pieces or crush them to powder
— or whether we are " steadfast " there, as are our
friends in the invaded districts, ignorant of all that
is going on, out of touch with all the world, exposed
to all the wiles, the cruelties and the falsehoods of
a shameless foe, menaced each day with starvation,
arrest, deportation and execution — is it not largely
the same silent form of duty ? The great deeds and
the fine words, the rattle of sword-blades, the frenzy
of the charge, the theatrical intoxication of glory,
all these are of small account here. This courage is
nameless. Most commonly we know nothing of
it, and it knows nothing of itself. What is its
business ? Never to flinch, to keep, through every-
thing, its coolness and its confidence, to preserve —
even unto the death — the freedom of its intelligence
and of its will.

Well, even as they are steadfast in our trenches
while they wait for the day, so ardently desired,
when we shall overthrow and hurl back the
detested foe, so are they steadfast in all our

THE PEOPLE 129

towns and all our villages, from the bogs of
our Ardennes to the coal-beds of our Borinage,
and the sands of our Campine, and the polders
of our Flanders.

Everywhere breathes the same patriotism : at
Liege, that Chevaliere of the Legion of Honour, to
whom the waves of the Meuse bring, like the con-
tinuation of her own resistance and a promise of
her speedy liberation, the sound of the heroic defence
of Verdun ; at Brussels, where the statue of the
Archangel Michael, on the summit of her Hotel de
Ville, points to the sky with his shining sword and
symbolizes the eternal triumph of Truth over Pride ;
at Bruges, whose glorious belfry, slowly born out
of this ancient earth, where art, freedom and
solid toil have ever dwelt, reminds our uneasy
tyrants that our people may have at times been
conquered, but subdued — never !

Nor does the enemy deceive himself. Though
he has betrayed the little country that he had sworn
to protect, though he has delivered her over, in his
cowardice, to fire and the sword, the only gain
which will remain to him will be the ineffaceable
shame of his perjury and his barbarism. And to-
day— even before our arms and the victory of the
Powers who are allied in the service of the Right
have ensured to us the reparation which we await —
if we have to choose between this little martyred
land and the great Empire of Germany, which, I
ask you, is the nation whose stature in the eyes

9

130 THE WAY OF HONOUR

of the world and of History has been increased by
this war ?

The illustrious citizen of France who presides over
us to-day, and who, after having done us the honour
to be born amongst us, has always done us the
kindness to remember the circumstance, said last
year in this very place :

" Belgium is not only the stake of this struggle,
but the pledge of Universal Justice."

It is precisely that. And let me add that to France
belongs the glory of being the guarantor.

Faithful to her destiny, France — France, with
her sword held high, loyalty glowing in her eyes,
proud and resolute as in the first day of the war —
France is to-day the true incarnation of the rights
of every man, of the freedom of all of us, nations
as well as individuals — that freedom which is now
on its defence against the most formidable irruption
of barbarism that the world has seen.

Nothing, unless it be the courage of our allied
armies, to-day gives greater strength to our hopes.

For the Right does not die, and if its flame
may for a moment tremble, it is only to shine
presently for the world with a new glory upon
the horizon.

Whether he puts faith in the unlimited progress
of Humanity or in its providential destiny, the think-
ing man cannot allow such a reversal of the moral
law as that implied in a world in which everything
that makes life worth living — the true, the beautiful

THE PEOPLE 131

and the good — must give place to the stifling fumes
of a Kultur which recognizes no rights against
crime.

When Justice beholds some of the effects of this
pestilence, her reason revolts and her heart is heavy.
She suffers under the insolent violation of promises,
from the destruction of so many lives and so much
beauty, from the spectacle of Science transformed
into the servant of Death :

Souffre, 6 cceur gros de haine, affami de justice.

Suffer, or rather, struggle ! Struggle onwards in
the joy of your ideal ! Let your hate grow tenfold
stronger. Let your love of the Right unite for
victory all the energies of your will !

A nation drunk with pride, but already yielding
under a dull anguish, fears not to associate the
name of God with the most cynical scorn of innocence.

But our civilization is no longer, and will never
again become, the monstrous imposture of Baal or
of Moloch. It is the daughter of Him who said
upon the Mount :

" Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after
righteousness, for they shall be filled."

r

132 THE WAY OF HONOUR

UNION AROUND THE KING

A speech delivered on the iqth of November 1916, at
the Trocadero in Paris, on the occasion of the
celebration of the name-days of the King and
Queen of the Belgians.

MESSIEURS LES MINISTRES, LADIES AND GENTLE-
MEN,—

He who is honoured with the task of addressing
a great assembly, the members of which are unknown
to him and have been brought together from every
quarter of the compass, who belong to the most
various sections of society and are possessed by
many and various opinions and convictions — such
a man discovers a certain difficulty in grasping and
analysing the corporate thought of his audience.
Most commonly he does well to explore for a while
this unknown land in order to seek for and find,
beneath the confused strata of the surface, the solid,
the virgin rock upon which he may set his foot
firmly while he carries his design into execution.

As far as this splendid meeting of to-day is con-
cerned, it is not so, and one feels here, at once, how
vain all such probing of the surface, all such oratorical
preliminaries, must be.

The thought which has brought you here together
broods, as it were, over this throng. It is to me as
if I saw it vibrating in the air which surrounds

THE PEOPLE 133

us, reflected from every face and shining in
every eye in this vast and crowded building.
Already it has been expressed in the speech of the
President of the Association generate Beige. As for
me, a Minister of King Albert, my task will be at
the same time a simple and a pleasant one, namely,
to draw it into myself and to allow it for a moment
to speak aloud, just as it comes to me from your
thoughts and hearts.

This thought which we all share, you know that
outside this building it is no less dear to the French
of Paris and elsewhere. You know how, passing
even beyond the wide circle of the nations of the
Great Entente, it extends, I dare to say it, even to
the boundaries of the civilized world. But you will
all understand that on this day that is so full of
memories and of hope, when we are celebrating the
festivals of St. Albert and St. Elizabeth, the thought
of their beloved Sovereigns fills with a still livelier
enthusiasm, and brings even more close together,
the Belgians present here to-day and all their fellow-
countrymen : the Belgians who are in exile, the
Belgians who are in the Army, and the Belgians
who have remained in the invaded territory.

The Belgians who are in exile ! No matter with
what attentive, tactful, and generous a friendship
our Allies or the neutral countries entertain them
and comfort their sorrows — and God knows in how

134 THE WAY OF HONOUR

full a measure France has contributed to their assist-
ance ! — they are still " refugees." Men and women,
old people and children, they eat the bitter bread
of suffering. They sigh, through nights of pain,
after the brighter dawn that is to come. Their
hearts, torn by privation, ruin and loss, remain
fixed upon the dear beings who have stayed
behind, upon their homes, their old habits of life,
the interests that are threatened or have been
destroyed.

Perhaps at times the temptation assails them to
complain. But then — what is it which arrests the
complaint upon their lips ? What but the very
thought which to-day dominates us all !

They think of their young Sovereigns, who have
abandoned all the splendour and joy of existence,
and who are watching over there, on their Flemish
dune, in a modest cottage exposed to all the gales
of the North Sea and close to the line of battle.

They think of that King who recks nothing of
his own glory, who lives only for his daily duty as
a soldier, with all its perils, and for his daily duty as
a leader, with all its cares.

They think of that Queen who shares his cares
and his dangers, and whose great heart, which
sorrow has pierced only to enlarge it, is ever to
be found by the bedside of wounded men and
abandoned children.

Glorious examples of self-sacrifice and nobility, of
knightly honour and moral splendour !

THE PEOPLE 135

And so — regis ad exemplar — he who was about to
give way, stands firm. He understands what he
too owes to his country, and that he may not allow
weariness to get the better for a moment of his
endurance.

And if it should happen to him to have still more
cruel sacrifices to make, he will say, as a Belgian
manufacturer wrote to me lately — he was a refugee
in France and his son had just been killed in the
trenches : " My son is dead. Long live the King ! "

And our soldiers ! You can imagine, even if you
do not know, how this common thought which
moves us here strives ceaselessly in their minds.

As he was leaving Brussels on the 5th of August
1914, to place himself at their head, the King issued
to them a famous proclamation :

Remember (he said to them) that you are fighting
for liberty and for your threatened homes. Remember,
Flemings, the Battle of the Golden Spurs. And you,
Walloons of Liege, who are at this moment in the post
of honour, remember the six hundred Franchimontois.

It is strange, is it not ? that twice since that
day the advance of the enemy has been shattered
by the Belgian Army, in two memorable encounters
the result of which was perhaps decisive for the
fate of our arms and of our great Allies.

Well, the first of these took place on Walloon
soil, at Liege, and close to that Plateau of Sainte-

136 THE WAY OF HONOUR

Walburge where, in 1468, the heroism of the Franchi-
montois, summoned to his aid by their monarch,
opposed itself to the might of a traitor king.

On the second occasion it was in Flanders, on the
Yser, but two cannon-shot from the famous marsh
where in 1302 the men of the communes, on the day
of the Golden Spurs, stopped and broke the fury
of a foreign invasion.

On the first day, in front of Liege, obedient to
the call of their King, our little soldiers confronted,
alone, forces of the enemy five times greater than
themselves, and those the picked troops of the
Empire. They checked them and held them, and
laid low 42,700 Germans.

General Leman commanded this heroic defence
— which the world watched with breathless suspense.
On the 6th of August he was established in the fort
of Loncin. There he held out until the I5th. On
that day, bombarded by 420-0. m. shells, the fort
was completely destroyed by the explosion of a
magazine, and General Leman, whom the gas had
asphyxiated, was carried out from among the ruins
unconscious. Next day, he wrote to the King this
letter, whose beauty is surely worthy of antiquity :

" SIRE,

" You will learn with sorrow that the fort
of Loncin was blown up yesterday at about
5.20 p.m., burying under its ruins the greater
part, perhaps four-fifths, of its garrison.

THE PEOPLE 137

" This explosion was the result of the fire of an
artillery of extraordinary power, after a violent
bombardment. The fort was far from being built
to resist such formidable methods of destruction.

" I am certain that I have preserved stainless
the honour of our arms. I have yielded neither
the fortress nor its forts.

" Deign, Sire, to pardon the faults of this letter.
I am physically prostrated by the explosion at
Loncin. I would gladly have given my life could
I have served you better, but Death has not been
willing to accept me.

" In Germany, whither I am bound, my thoughts
will always be what they have always been : Belgium
and her King/'

Two months went by. Two months of end-
less and sanguinary fighting, wherein our little
Army, hemmed in and harassed by innumerable
foes, defended step by step the soil of the homeland.

Only a few days ago, at the Sorbonne, M. Louis
Marin, Deputy for Nancy, narrated with equal
precision and eloquence our military history of those
two months : the resistance on the Gette, the daring
and opportune sorties from Antwerp, the defence
of that fortress, where the enemy confidently ex-
pected to crush our Army and which our Army
abandoned only at the last moment and empty as
an old glove. Then " the race to the sea " : the
German Staff hoped to compensate itself for its

138 THE WAY OF HONOUR

defeat upon the Marne by seizing Calais, the key
of England. At this moment the left wing of the
French was still far away. Our men arrived upon
the Yser, wearied and careworn by two long months
of fighting, suffering and loss. " Hold fast for
forty-eight hours on the Yser," King Albert was
asked by the French High Command. And King
Albert addressed to his men on the I3th of October
a proclamation in which he says :

Soldiers !

See, in the positions where I am placing you,
that your eyes look only forwards, and hold him a
traitor to his country who shall pronounce the word
" retreat " unless the formal order has been given !

And so, seeing their Soldier-king on foot at their
head, proudly established upon this inviolate corner
of the country's soil, firmly resolved not to abandon
a hand's-breadth of it, they understood. And for
all their fatigue, their cares and their sufferings,
in spite of the rain and the mud, the shells and the
machine guns, they stood up to seven divisions of
the German Army, which moved upon them from
the north and the east, supported by four hundred
pieces of artillery. Admirably led by Ronarch',
Meiser and Jacques, they made many a bloody gap
in the advancing lines of Germans. They were
called on to hold the Yser for two days. At the
end of a fortnight they held it still. At this moment

THE PEOPLE 139

the division of Grossetti arrived and the inundations
completed the work of defence. Out of 48,000
infantry which we had been able to put into the line
we had lost 14,000. The survivors — I saw them at
the time, their eyes glowing but their faces drawn
with their effort, all drenched with the rain and
literally clothed in mud — the survivors, I say, were
themselves astonished that they had succeeded.
What was it that had stimulated them to their
deed ? The King's example.

This common thought which is at the same time
ours, that of our refugees, and that of our soldiers,
is also that of our wounded. The same comforting
image which hovers over our trenches appears
also in those tragic shrines of pain and devotion —
our ambulances and hospitals.

My official position causes me, since the war
broke out, to receive from time to time, in order
later on to forward them to families which have
remained in the occupied territory, the last letters
and the wills of those among our soldiers who have
felt themselves dying. Ah ! those admirable " scraps
of paper," scrawled often in a writing which hesitates
and trembles, spotted often with a tear or a drop
of blood. The style and handwriting of them may
be uneducated. They are not the less fine.

Here, word for word, is the farewell of a young
non-commissioned officer, a Fleming, wounded in
eighteen places, and dead in one of our hospitals
at the front :

140 THE WAY OF HONOUR

" DEAR PARENTS AND BELOVED BROTHERS AND
SISTERS, —

" When this letter is handed to you, I shall
be in Heaven among the dead heroes of the war, for
my conduct on the field of battle. I have died for
Justice ! Long live King Albert and Queen Eliza-
beth ! Long live Belgium and her people !
" I embrace you with all my heart/'

And here is another and a no less beautiful " scrap
of paper."

It is dated only a few days ago, and came to
me from that invaded country, our Mater Dolorosa,
to which we are attached by the " immobility of
tombs and the movement of cradles."

This letter brings to us the echo of our common
thought, and as we read it we can see something
of the warmth and unity of the patriotism and
loyalty which, yonder, sustain our brothers in their
chains and their enforced silence, and we feel how
mystical a breath must pass, on such an anniversary
as this, over the whole martyred land.

At this very moment, as you know, the invader,
outdoing all his former crimes, is proceeding with
the methodical deportation of our workmen. Dragged
from their homes, they are invited to sign I know
not what agreement to work for the German, a
proposal which they refuse. And while the trains
carry them away eastwards, in cattle-trucks, our
people, held back at the point of the bayonet, hear
them, as they pass, singing our national airs. And

THE PEOPLE 141

as they go by they throw out notes like this that I
am about to read to you.

And will you tell me if our Sovereigns could hope,
for their fete, for a more moving form of homage
on the part of these brave fellows ? — who know, we
must remember, that had the King, the Government,
and Parliament, on the day when the Germans
demanded passage through our country in order
to attack France, made but a sign of the head, or
even maintained silence, our nation would have
been spared its martyrdom.

" Voor de Duitsche werken? Nooit! Of nog veel
min onze naam op papier zetten! Leve Albert,
Koning der Belgen!"

That is to say : " Work for the Germans ?
Never ! And still less sign anything for them, no
matter what ! Long live Albert, King of the

Belgians ! "

* * *

What a beauty there is in those few lines, and
what a lesson !

Let us be true to the common thought which in-
spired them. May union around the King, which
as if by instinct was realized on the 2nd of August
1914, remain for us the word of command.

Union ? More than that : Unity. No more Right,
Left and Centre ; but the King and the Flag. But one
party — Belgium. But a single interest — the Nation.

Do you remember the sacred enthusiasm with

142 THE WAY OF HONOUR

which we were exalted when, by the light of the
thunderbolt of the 2nd of August, our collective soul
was to us so clearly revealed ; when at the historic
session of Parliament, all the representatives of the
country echoed the oath of the King and resolved
to endure all things rather than sell themselves or
yield ; when in our squares and streets the crowd
cheered our soldiers as they hastened to the frontier.

Let us treasure the precious memory of those
thrilling and heroic hours, and if it must be that
time is to pass, may it be only to give to our
union and our activities a greater serenity and a
more efficient method.

Method !

Henceforward every one understands that in the
present war all, civilians and soldiers, women and
men, those in the rear and those in the front, have
their necessary and useful roles. The Army wher
it fights is the white-crested wave which hurls itself
furiously upon the shore. Behind it, there is the
ocean of national energy whence it borrows its
rhythm and whence it draws its strength. Let us
bring to this vast reservoir, as the Government
directs us, everything that is ours of resource and
ability. Let us cast away into it also our personal
interests, our comfortable habits and our pleasures.

And this up to complete victory. I say " com-
plete," because nothing but a premature peace
could any longer serve the designs of Germany. I
say " complete," because Belgium must be resolved
upon such a peace more than any other nation.

:

THE PEOPLE 143

Not only is this the price of her restoration, not
only is her whole future involved, as is that of all
the Powers of the second rank, in her making certain
that Justice henceforth alone shall dominate the
relations which subsist between States, but her
geographical situation makes, for her alone, her
liberty and her strength both the conditions of
her own progress and the guarantee of the future
safety of Europe.

This complete victory, the work of patience and
endurance, the reward of supreme effort, will come.
It approaches already. And already our watchful
eyes divine its advance, through the storm and the
hurricane, through the fog of seas and the smoke
of battles, like unto the winged figure which the
ancients sculptured on the prows of their ships.

And when it shall have come, who is there who
does not already hope that our union of to-day in
the war, around the King, will remain the union
of to-morrow, in the restoration ?

Our bleeding country will then have to recover
the art of living, while it will find itself faced by
many problems of a national and international kind.
To repair our ruins ; to heal our wounds ; to assure
ourselves against all chance of a future attack by
Germany ; there, at the crossways of Europe, to
resume our rank in the universal civilization and
economy, but a rank raised higher by the measure
of our pride in our sacrifices and the bravery of our

144 THE WAY OF HONOUR

soldiers ; to provide for our coming generations
one and the same national ambition. Who then
will dream of renewing the bad old ways of aforetime,
or of giving more importance to the particularities
of groups of classes and of language than to this
great common task ? Shall we not, rather, see,
beautified by all the majesty of the Epic through
which we shall have lived and whose spirit our
soldiers shall carefully preserve, the great State
policy which guided us during the first years of our
Independence ? I think so, indeed.

How brightly is the future of this fraternal colla-
boration in the restoration and elevation of our
country illuminated for us, my dear compatriots,
by our assurance of the noble and powerful friend-
ships which we have so firmly acquired !

In his last speech in the Reichstag, Herr von
Bethmann-Hollweg defended himself — poor innocent !
— against the charge of having at any time spoken
of the annexation of Belgium.

Nevertheless, exhibiting for us an indescribable
species of hypocritical sympathy, which is more hate-
ful to us than his hate, he declared that " Germany
would never permit Belgium to become, whether
politically or economically, the vassal of England
and France."

Well, every honest person knows that Belgium
has never been, and intends never to be, the vassal
of any one.

Ever since she was constituted a nation, she has
shown herself at the same time jealously proud of her

THE PEOPLE 145

independence and faithful to a scruple, to martyrdom,
to the neutrality which has been imposed upon her.

But the war, which has cost her and continues to
cost her so many sacrifices, sorrows and losses, has
already won for her at least one right : that of freely
nourishing her affections, of affirming them and of
proving them.

And how thoroughly these affections have been
won and will be retained by those Allied Powers,
and particularly by France, who, guarantors of our
independence and neutrality, have added to the
most loyal respect for the given word the most
tactful and attentive friendship.

Ever since 1830, upon the day and the morrow
of birth as an independent State, it is France who
has encouraged us, it is she who has helped us.

In 1870, during that tragic year when we followed
so closely and soothed as best we might her pain,
from the first day of the war, it was France who
loyally declared to the Government of Queen Victoria
that come what might, and whatever advantage
she might reap, she would respect our soil and our
independence.

Since then, under Leopold II and under Albert I,
the Government of the Third Republic has let no
occasion escape her by which she might emphasize
for us her sympathy and her confidence.

Who can say that we should not love France ?

Who can deny us the right to cry it aloud, with
all the strength of our gratitude ?

10

146 THE WAY OF HONOUR

Yes, we love her, as we love great England, who
has always been equally our loyal friend, and with
them will we detest and do battle against the two
dishonoured Powers who, after having brutally
violated the neutrality of a little country which
they had sworn to protect, seem to wish to sink
each day a little lower into their own shame and
barbarity and crime.

While, the longer this war lasts, the more decisive
and deep-seated become our reasons, each day, for
loving France and our motives for admiring her.

At Clermont-Ferrand, on the pedestal of the
statue of Vercingetorix, I remember reading this
proud reply which the Gallic hero addressed to
Caesar :

J'ai pris les armes pour la libertt de tous.

Three weeks ago, during the solemn session of
the Institute, I heard M. Paul Deschanel, the Presi-
dent of the Chamber of Deputies, cry in an im-
passioned burst of eloquence : " To-day all France
fights for all humanity."

And so, after twenty centuries, France remains
faithful to her destiny. What chiefly characterizes
her is not pride, nor envy, nor the worship of force.
It is her worship of the Ideal, her devotion to Honour,
even another's.

And this is why all the nations for whom Right
is not an idle word nor Good Faith a " scrap of
paper," salute her, admire her, and love her like a
mother.

IV

THE FUNDAMENTAL
CAUSES OF BELGIUM'S
RESISTANCE

THE PERMANENCE OF BELGIAN
NATIONALITY

THE energy and tenacity which Belgium has opposed
and continues to oppose to the German aggression
have not only excited the admiration of the world.
We must admit that they have also, for many people,
been a matter for surprise.

The world at large had but a dim conception of
Belgian nationality. It regarded this nationality
as a sort of wholly artificial barrier, invented on
the morrow of the triumphant rising of 1830 by a
few discreet diplomats, particularly by Palmerston.
Among the historians themselves there were many
who had no suspicion that the roots of this nation-
ality were buried in a very distant past. Did not
Hippolyte Taine, in his classical work The Art of
the Low Countries, write this authoritative sentence :
" All the world knows that the name of Belgium
dates from the French Revolution " ?

Nothing, however, could be more false. The
Belgians, whom Caesar describes for us in his Com-
mentaries as " the bravest of all the Gauls," have
never ceased, throughout the ages, to exist as a true

147

148 THE WAY OF HONOUR

nationality. Any one who studies closely the history
of Europe from the moral, political and economic
points of view, will discover in the country watered
by the Scheldt and the Meuse a permanent ethical
group, whereinto the streams of German and Latin
blood have never ceased to flow, there to mingle
and combine into a special civilization, whose
manners, customs and habits have always been
definitely distinct from those of their neighbours.

It is true that at times this nationality has been
split up. The Middle Ages saw it divided into
principalities, duchies and counties, of which some
owed allegiance to the French Crown — Flanders,
for instance — while others, like the Ecclesiastical Prin-
cipality of Liege, were vassals of the German Empire.

It is true that this nationality does not enjoy the
benefit of unity of language . Two linguistic groups
have always divided its territory between them,
and the frontier which marks off their respective
zones is very much the same to-day as it was in the
twelfth century.

It is true that this nationality has no natural
geographical frontiers. While its extent is restricted,
the territory in which the Belgians have never ceased
to dwell, to struggle and to suffer, is of an extremely
diverse character. Dunes along the sea coast, plains
in Flanders, sand in Campine, hills in Brabant,
rocky valleys along the Meuse, plateaux in the
Ardennes — what a variety of landscape in so small
a space !

CAUSES OF BELGIUM'S RESISTANCE 149

It is true that this nationality has long been
dominated by foreign Powers. In modern times
it has been governed, in turn, by Spain, Austria,
France and Holland.

Yet in spite of all these unfavourable circumstances,
which have often deceived the superficial observer,
Belgian nationality is just as real as the English,
the French or the German. It is an historical
entity which has never been absorbed by its neigh-
bours and the destiny of which has never ceased
to develop along characteristic and organic lines,
in correlation with certain peculiar interests and
requirements.

This theory, which illumines so vividly the role
which Belgium is playing in the grand drama of
to-day, I propose to prove to you by a rapid survey

of her past.

* * *

Let us attempt to obtain a general conception of
that changeful, strange and passionate history which
has enabled Belgium to survive so many international
storms, as well as her own misfortunes and errors,
and to become entitled to adopt the famous motto :
Fluctuat nee mergitur.

Belgian nationality first declares itself in an heroic
defence of the soil against the greed of Rome. After
twenty centuries, it is the same resistance which she
offers to-day. Later, during the break up of the
Roman Empire, she absorbs, almost without a
struggle, those Franks who quickly attached them-

150 THE WAY OF HONOUR

selves to our soil and became mingled with our
race. The Carlo vingians were true Belgians. The
cradle of their glory was Landen and Herstal in
the Liege country. The institutions which Charle-
magne developed and spread through his whole
empire were the customs and laws which were
already existing in our land.

For example, the Feudal System, which established
itself through the continuance, first in individuals
and then in families, of offices instituted by the
Carlovingians. Our nationality sought safety under
its aegis. As it fought against Roman autocracy,
so it fought in the ninth century against the
imperial despotism of Germany. It saw its decline
in the Peace of Cologne and its end in the battle of
Woeringen.

During the amazing upheavals of the twelfth
century, elsewhere marked by so much violence
and excess, Belgium appeared as the real guiding
spirit of the time. By making the Peace of God
and the Paix de Comte, she expressed the ideals
of Christianity and Chivalry in all their purity.
Again she adopted them when she drew all Europe
along the road to the Holy Sepulchre, which was
to prove the road of Progress. It was our Belgian
blood which reigned with Godfrey of Bouillon at
Jerusalem and Baldwin of Hainault at Constantinople.
At the same time Belgium, by her charters, her
constitutions and her " Joyous Entries," was initiating
the other nations into the political life by those

CAUSES OF BELGIUM'S RESISTANCE 151

expressions of the perfect balance of all her social
forces.

This century and the next marked the zenith of
her fortunes. While her towns were increasing
in number everywhere, while the weaving industry
flourished in the valley of the Scheldt and that of
metals beside the Meuse ; while her ships, capable
of carrying whole armies into the East, trafficked
in the wealth of the world ; while her rivers in the
south and the north and her roads eastwards and
westwards were flooded with merchandise, her
cathedrals and belfries sprang up from her soil,
like flowers in stone, to the brave songs of the
Companions.

But Belgian nationality was soon to suffer from
its very exuberance.

The famous battle of the nth July of 1302 was the
great day of our communal period, for it preserved
Flanders from a foreign yoke, but by what sterile
and fatal days was it to be followed !

Throughout this century of storm, disturbances
are everywhere, authority nowhere. Power has
passed into the hands of a bourgeois oligarchy
which uses it with caution, exaggerating commercial
advantages and multiplying economic privileges.
The love of work grows steadily weaker. The taxes
mount to unheard-of figures. Each man has his
hands among the public money or relies for his
living upon some statute. The great Flemish cities
— Ghent, Bruges, Ypres — oppress the small towns

152 THE WAY OF HONOUR

fight amongst themselves, and are themselves the
theatre of incessant conflicts between bourgeois
and craftsman. It is then that Jacques van Arte-
velde, the " wise man of Flanders " and the author
of the treaty of 1337, which contains the germ of
the confederation of all our principalities, appeals
to the son of Edward III. And from that time
onwards becomes visible the part which England
is henceforth to play towards our nation.

Though the confederation of which Artevelde
dreamed does not materialize, the personal union
of our States — of all the Belgium of to-day — is
realized in the fifteenth century. This is the work
of Philip the Good and Charles the Bold — the grand
leaders of the West.

These two men, the first thanks to his skill, the
second in spite of his rashness, bring our Flemish
and W7alloon provinces together. And in spite of
disputes and wars, our nationality now enjoys some
admirable days of power, wealth and beauty.
Charles V, the great-grandson of Charles the Bold,
was born in Ghent and was wholly of our race. The
Belgians rightly considered him as a national sovereign.
As Van Praet has so well said : " Charles V never
applied the levelling instrument of despotism to
the institutions of our provinces. The country
retained its character. The aristocracy was in no
way humiliated nor was the principle of national
representation destroyed." Judged fairly, Charles
V appears as the upholder, during an epoch of

CAUSES OF BELGIUM'S RESISTANCE 153

despotism, of the work which was accomplished
by our national dynasties during an epoch of
liberty. Supported by Belgian money, aided by
Belgian ministers, Belgian generals, Belgian diplo-
matists, he arrested, in accordance with our
traditions, the flood of Mahommedanism, defended
Catholicism, and preserved for our administrative
and judicial institutions those characteristics of
autonomy and variety which, even to-day, offer
so great a contrast to the spirit of " centralization "
prevailing in France.

Just as fully as Charles V understood our national
character, did his son despise or misconceive it. This
mistake, which most clearly showed itself in the face
of a threatening agitation on the part of the nobility,
was the chief cause of that unlucky storm which
ended by dividing the Low Countries into two
portions.

Once that storm had blown over, our nationality
entered upon a long period of political prostration,
but of moral and artistic activity. No longer was
political energy displayed, but, on the other hand,
arose learned men such as Stevin, Van Helmont,
Bollandus and Justus Lipsius, painters like Rubens,
Van Dyck and Teniers. In the midst of incessant
war and invasion, bled in turn by hostile armies
and veteran soldiers who were supposed to protect
it, under the direction of a States General without
power, the Belgian nationality seemed to languish
and waste away. At one moment, it even looked

154 THE WAY OF HONOUR

as if the Treaty of the Barrier was about to bury it
forever, like the stone laid upon a tomb.

The Braban^on Revolution was a national reaction
— a reaction against the innumerable encroachments
of the Austrian Government ; a reaction of our
traditional habits and beliefs, oppressed by Joseph II
in the name of a tyrannical philosophy — Joseph,
that crazy Emperor who persisted in discovering
amongst us maladies which we had never even
suspected : just as, in Moliere's comedy, Toinette
proves to Argan that his leg and his arm ought to
be amputated and " that it is a bad sign when a
sick man is unaware of any discomfort.''

Our provincial Parliaments protest. Joseph II
dissolves them. The Belgians of 1789 reply by an
insurrection and by the foundation of that shortlived
Republic of the United States of Belgium, which
brought home to us all the reality of the common
Fatherland. Out of this our nationality emerged,
with the Hague Congress, less enslaved than formerly
and ripe for a decisive attempt. Under the domina-
tion of France, the Peasants' War marks a new
protest of the national sentiment, which, finally,
explodes in 1830.

Though, in 1839, Belgian nationality was forced
to submit to a cruel mutilation, by the Treaty of
the Twenty-four Articles, which robbed it, together
with a part of Limbourg and a part of Luxembourg,
of parts of itself, since then this plant, whose strength
has only grown the more robust the more obstacles

CAUSES OF BELGIUM'S RESISTANCE 155

it has had to overcome, has even increased in size
and in vigour.

In 1914 and since, those who know its history have,
together with the whole world, watched admiringly
the energy of its resistance ; but that resistance
has not surprised them. In the light of the past
they understand the present.

This persistence of Belgian nationality, which
thus emerges from the study of our vicissitudes
throughout the centuries, finds its confirmation
in the persistence of those special characteristics
which the Belgians generally recognize in one
another.

If the Belgian is not so deeply imbued as other
races with respect for the doctrine of absolute
equality or for the principle of the absolute
superiority of the State, he is, on the other hand,
animated by an ardent love of liberty and a respect
for the rights of the individual, which oppose them-
selves to the encroachments of authority, favour
individualism, and tolerate no other institutions
than those which conform to their sentiments.

To these institutions the Belgian people holds fast
with an undying attachment. It perseveres in
this to such a degree that to-day its institutions,
both political, communal, social, military, judicial
and administrative, preserve the indelible imprint
of those of former times. The principle of the free

156 THE WAY OF HONOUR

choice of the sovereign by the nation and its associa-
tion with him in the supreme authority, are to be
found alike in the speech made by Ambiorix to
Caesar, in the complaints of the communes of
Flanders, Brabant and Liege, in the recrimina-
tions addressed by the nobles to Philip II, in
the remonstrances offered by the States General to
Joseph II and in the protests of our representatives
at the Convention.

The theory of self-government has never ceased
to enjoy a legal existence : our legislative chambers
are the ancient Assemblies of May transformed
first into placita generalia and then into States
General. As for our communal independence — the
inheritance of eight centuries of history — it forms
to-day, as in so many of the critical periods of our
past, the very buckler of our patriotic resistance.

For the right understanding of the history of our
military organization, we must remember how deep-
rooted were the precautions taken, not against
national security, but against the life of the
barracks and the garrison, in the midst of a popula-
tion like our own, which is accustomed to confuse
the soldier (soldat) and the veteran (soudard) with
the invader or the occupier of its territory. On the
other hand, the old communal militias and our
ancient Serments have continued to exist in Belgium
under the name of the " Civic Guard " and in the
form of special corps.

Attached as she is to her civil institutions, Belgium

CAUSES OF BELGIUM'S RESISTANCE 157

is no less deeply devoted to her religious traditions.
During the period of the Crusades the Christian
belief was very powerful amongst us. " It was at
that time," writes Pirenne, the historian, " stronger
there than in any other part of Europe. It took
possession of the national imagination so com-
pletely that, throughout the Middle Ages, the peoples
of the valleys of the Scheldt and the Meuse never
ceased to be distinguished for the ardour of their
faith and the sincerity of their piety." The monas-
tery, which flourished so greatly, seems to have
been the effect rather than the cause of this condi-
tion of affairs. The Crusades, wrherein our pilgrim
soldiers " were truly and entirely," as Pirenne else-
where observes, " the soldiers of the Pope," enthusi-
astically affirmed the national sentiment. From
century to century, history shows us how strong
this sentiment was in Belgium. It explains those
famous and peculiarly uncompromising declarations
made by our States General before they ratified the
Pacification of Ghent.

The same feeling inspired those legions of monks
and missionaries which Francois Xavier summoned
to the ends of India : "Da mihi Belgas." It is
still manifest in the Revolution of Brabant, as
throughout our internal policy since 1830. And
is it not this which to-day explains the lofty moral
and patriotic influence which the Belgian episcopate
exerts, in the teeth of the enemy, over all our people
in the invaded territory ? And how can we fail to

158 THE WAY OF HONOUR

recognize also, in the resistance of that population,
the happy effect of another ancient characteristic
of Belgium ? I mean, the integrity of the judicial
authority and its absolute independence of the
political.

Thus all the national characteristics, recognized
in our past and illuminated by History, show us how
strongly we are bound to the ancient inhabitants of
our soil.

Are not these things the products of our soil —
the true Belgian chivalry, the sound common sense,
the family traditions deep-rooted in the heart, the
capacity for organization and mutual association
in the arrangement of our lives, in our industrial
enterprises and in intellectual things, and, to-day,
in the work of feeding and assisting our people —
and Belgian " bonhomie," that compound of chaff,
a boy's mischief, and that spirit of " zwanse," which
contrasts its love of amusements at once with French
wit and the thickheadedness of Germany — and also
the attraction which the pleasures of the table and
the cellar have generally for the Belgians ? Yes, we
may readily admit this weakness — may we not ? — in
these days when Belgium has proved that, if she
was the country of good living, she can also, when
necessary, be the country of good dying.

And everywhere, throughout the ages — from the
reclaiming of our polders and the clearing of our
forests down to the colonization of the Congo —
courage for toil, eagerness for the task, work both

CAUSES OF BELGIUM'S RESISTANCE 159

considered and calm and resolute — calm as our plains,
resolute as our rocks. " A race which accomplishes
things," says a French critic, M. Charles Morice,
" born of constancy in effort and with no time for
learning to dream, which first and always has been
compelled to absorb itself in the material necessities
of an existence that is threatened by the sky, the
sea and men. A race which has hardly any resources
but its own courage."

All these characteristics are expressed not only
in the study of events, but in all the research to which
psychologists and archaeologists have devoted their
laborious work.

But in order that this nationality should be known
and understood, not only by a few learned men, but
by the entire world, it was necessary that the tragic
adventure through which we are to-day passing
should have been experienced. The heroism of the
Belgium of 1914 has revealed a nationality of twenty
centuries whose will to live has displayed itself with
an irresistible force, and now proves itself deeper
than all sorrow, braver than all sacrifice and stronger
than death itself.

THE MILITARY TRADITIONS OF THE
BELGIANS1

EVERY man is the type of his race. Without
knowing it, the Belgian soldier of the Great War

* Preface to a book by M. Maurice des Ombiaux : Pastes
militaires des Beiges (Paris, Bloud et Gay).

160 THE WAY OF HONOUR

reproduces the thoughts and deeds of his ancestors.
He renews, while giving to them a new breadth and
beauty, the virtues of the Communiers of Groeninghe
and of the woodcutters of Franchimont, the Patriotes
of the Braban9on Revolution and the blue-bloused
volunteers of the September Days.

While our Army is writing with its blood the most
tragic and most glorious page of our history, it is a
labour of duty no less than of immediate importance
to fill it with the sentiment of continuity and, by
recalling for it our past, to associate as it were the
valour of our ancestors with the heroism of their
descendants.

I can gladly imagine our officers and soldiers on
the Yser — yes, even the simplest of our " jas" —
during their watches in camp, amusing, instructing
and stimulating themselves by reading or listening
to these Pastes militaires des Beiges which M. Maurice
des Ombiaux has so happily put together.

By the glow of the camp fires, how brightly all
that past will be lit up for them ! And how much
better they will understand the events of which they
have already heard ! How near to themselves will
they feel these soldiers of the old wars, of whose
great deeds they perhaps knew nothing ! Times
and actions mingling together in their imagination,
some hero of Kollin or of Belgrade will appear to
them with the familiar features of their comrades
of Liege, or Haelen, of Hofstade or Dixmude or of
Steenstraete.

CAUSES OF BELGIUM'S RESISTANCE 161

It is a privilege reserved for all who have taken
part, either as actors or spectators, in any one of
those great disturbances which periodically shake
humanity to its centre, that history henceforth
assumes for them a significance which it never
possessed in the calm days of peace. In the stress
of great storms, all that was fixed ceases to be so.
The sense for the greatness of events and for the
providential destiny of peoples reveals itself. The
great figures of the past are no longer distant
shadows, vague and motionless. These shadows
grow in stature. They move, and their march
accompanies the march of the new generations.

In one of the most striking visions of the Bible,
the Prophet Ezekiel is transported into the midst
of an immense plain all scattered over with dry
bones. Suddenly, beneath the breath of the four
winds of the Spirit, the prophet sees these bones
arise in all the strength of life and become a vast,
indomitable army.

So for us to-day our military past lives again.
The bones of so many sons of Belgium, who have
died in the course of centuries in the defence of
our liberties, thrill to the echo of the bitter conflicts
which perpetuate and make greater their work.
The Belgians who, step by step, defended their land
against the covetousness of Caesar, those who under
the orders of Charles Martel or Godfrey de Bouillon
fought for Western civilization, the men of the
Flemish militia who, by the side of Breydel and

ii

162 THE WAY OF HONOUR

de Coninck, poured out their blood for their liberties,
the Walloon colliers and woodmen of Josse de Strailhe,
who sacrificed their lives to revenge the city which
a perjured king had betrayed, the soldiers of Van-
dermeersch who, in 1789, at Turnhout, drove the
Kaiserliks in rout before them, our fathers of 1830,
whose common sepulchre in the Place des Martyrs
in Brussels has become, as it were, the tangible
symbol of legitimate authority which opposes a
detested and despised invader, all the men of our
past are now recalled for us. They watch the
soldiers of King Albert with approving eyes. They
admire them, they encourage them, they fight by
their sides. And because of this, the courage of
those soldiers burns more fiercely and more reso-
lutely.

Confronted with so crowded a past, M. Maurice
des Ombiaux had but one embarrassment — how to
choose. This marvellous story-teller for whom
a world outside us exists and who unites to the
picturesque veracity of the Walloon the exuberant
richness of Flemish colours, has not pretended to
call up for our eyes the whole panorama of our
military annals. He has selected certain characteris-
tic figures and episodes, around whom the pride of
our patriotism has grouped, with a kindred feeling
of admiration, other names, and other exploits. Let
me, in turn, recall those two stout men of Tournais,
Englebert and Letalde, who were the first to stand
upon the walls of Jerusalem ; Quenes de Bethune

CAUSES OF BELGIUM'S RESISTANCE 163

and many another captain, who, with Baldwin of
Hainault, founded the Latin Empire of Constanti-
nople ; in the fifteenth century, Jacques de Lalaing,
the " good Flemish knight " ; in the sixteenth cen-
tury, Charles of Lannoy, into whose hands Francois I
gave his sword at Pavia ; then, Egmont, the conqueror
of Gravelines ; in the seventeenth century, T'Serclaes
de Tilly, Clerfayt, who gained the day at Neer-
winden, and that exquisite, the Prince de Ligne, who
" laughed at danger," and whose military gifts were
scarcely surpassed by the graces of his person and
mind.

Nearer to us — and too little known — let me recall
that glorious Revolution of Brabant and the campaign
of the Meuse of 1790, when we saw the Belgian
volunteers of every age, running from every quarter
of the young country that was trying to live and
rallying round a new flag which has become our own,
assail for six months, with more heroism than skill,
an Imperial army as numerous as it was seasoned.
What a touching story, among many others, is that
of that company of the Canaries, out of which were
born our carabineers of to-day, formed by a stout
partisan of Brussels, Jean Baptiste Dumonceau, who
became, later, one of Napoleon's generals ! This
company, among the last to be recruited, was com-
posed almost wholly of volunteers of short stature
who, for this reason, had been rejected elsewhere.
Equipped Heaven knows how, Dumonceau had
found nothing with which to clothe them but some

164 THE WAY OF HONOUR

rubbishy cloth of a bright yellow colour, whence
came the nickname which they soon rendered
glorious. In the course of this campaign, wherein
they were employed upon certain attacks of an
extraordinary audacity, it was established as a fact
that never had a Canary given way by so much as
a step, save upon the order of his commandant.
Only once did Dumonceau degrade a soldier. This
man, placed as sentinel, solitary, on the right bank
of the Meuse, and attacked by a considerable body
of Imperialists, had believed that he could swim
across the river, intending, as he said, to warn his
comrades. The same day, this man blew out his
brains. At the end of the campaign no more than
a handful of the Canaries remained.

The long peace that reigned in our country from
1830 and the international statute which neutralized
our foreign policy were assuredly not calculated to
develop the military qualities of the Belgians. Yet
the sap had never ceased to flow through the tree
and its branches. Almost everywhere where it was
possible to find fighting going on, one could discover,
and in the post of danger, one or another son of
our soil, whose martial spirit had proved unable to
accommodate itself to a military existence that was
of necessity fixed and monotonous. The Mexican
adventure and above all the Epic of the Congo
have witnessed brilliantly to this ; and the his-
tory of the Army of the Dutch Indies, like that
of the Foreign Legion, has never ceased to do the

CAUSES OF BELGIUM'S RESISTANCE 165

same. How many Belgians have gone out to war,
how many have died, under those distant skies,
who would have been so happy could they have
fought for their own country ! I cannot but think,
among others who have been seized with a like
homesickness for the battle-front, of my elder brother,
who quitted the regiment of the Guides in order to
go and fight in Egypt under the orders of Kitchener,
and died, a colonel, at the age of thirty-eight.

No, the martial valour of the Belgians has never
failed. And it is no sudden impulse, but a sort of
apotheosis, this marvellous heroism of our soldiers
of to-day, which all the world applauds and which
illumines with its glory the noblest and the most
unselfish of causes.

Let us cultivate these military virtues. They will
retain all their value, even when this hideous and
critical war shall have come to an end.

For all of us, in a world which will demand to be
built up again, physical education will appear more
and more as a necessity of individual life. While,
from a moral standpoint, it gives to each man
initiative, a liking for action and self-confidence, it
enriches the nation with deep-seated energies without
which her destiny can only decline. On the day of
the aggression we felt all the truth of the noble
words which were spoken by our King on the 4th
of August to the Belgian Parliament, and which he
has never ceased since, as before, the outbreak of
war to illustrate each day by his example : "A

i66 THE WAY OF HONOUR

country which defends itself is of necessity respected
by all." Upon the day of Peace, we must not
forget this other maxim — cruel though, in its
realism, it may appear : " One is truly free only
when one is strong."

THE ROOTS OF OUR NATIONALITY

An address delivered on the 26th of November 1915
at the Opening Session of the Geographical
Society of Paris.1

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, —

We are living in a time when, for each of us, and
particularly for those upon whom the responsibilities
of government are laid, it is necessary to keep in
our minds a truth which Michelet has crystallized
in the following words : " Economy of speech makes
for energy of action."

Profound though the truth of this maxim may be,

1 The session was held under the honorary presidency of
M. Etienne, formerly Minister of \Var, and the acting presi-
dency of M. Lallemand, Member of the Institute. On the
platform there were present : Baron Guillaume, Ambassador
of Belgium to France ; General Gouraud ; Generals Gamier
des Carets and Lebon ; Baron Hulot, General Secretary of
the Geographical Society ; M. de Margerie, M. Raphael
George-Levy, of the Institute ; the explorers, Commandants
Zeil and de Gerlache, leaders of the South Polar Expeditions
organized by the Belgica, as well as numerous other celebrities
both political and scientific. A lecture was delivered by
M. Pierre Nothomb upon " Belgium of Other Days."

CAUSES OF BELGIUM'S RESISTANCE 167

and convinced of its wisdom though I am, it is hardly
possible, I think, that after the reception with which
I have just met I should not express to you my
gratitude for this new demonstration of the friendship
uniting France and Belgium, which we owe to the
initiative of the Geographical Society.

This demonstration gains a peculiar value from
the very fame of this illustrious Society, which has
been for nearly a century one of the foci of the
French genius. Its value is increased, again, by the
reputation of the distinguished scientist who is our
Chairman to-night and the well-deserved prestige
of the statesman who has consented to become its
patron. It affords me great satisfaction to salute
in him a master of colonial policy whom our late
King held in very high and cordial estimation.

This friendship that exists between France and
Belgium, to which we are now so long accustomed,
scarcely needs to be expressed in words.

What could phrases, writings, diplomatic agree-
ments themselves, add to all that we have seen,
heard and experienced during the last year and a
quarter : the burning appeal which is addressed to
us by our fellow-citizens, yours as well as ours, whose
fields and towns the barbarian invasion has over-
whelmed, while it seeks, fruitlessly, to stifle their
patriotism and confidence ; the common sentiments
which are daily more actively aroused in our hearts
by the cynicism and the cruelty of an unscrupulous
aggressor ; and, above all, the blood of our sons,

168 THE WAY OF HONOUR

that pure blood which flows upon our soil, mingled
with the blood of great England's young manhood,
in the defence of Justice and Civilization itself ?

Is there not here, for the cementing of the most
wholehearted of friendships, more than all the phrases
or the signatures which could be exchanged ?

Your friendship is filled, you say, with gratitude
for that Belgium, neutral and loyal, who to-day
stoutly resists the aggressor, and who met the shock
of his first assault, and also with compassion for
the trials — truly indescribable — which our country
is now suffering.

Believe me, in every Belgian heart there is mingled
with this friendship, together with a profound grati-
tude for the loyalty of France, the guarantor of our
independence — for the generosity of France, the
comforter of our misfortunes — admiration for the
spectacle, at once prodigious and infectious, which
the soul of France to-day presents : her patriotism,
which subordinates all other interests to the necessary
union and action ; her courage in the field, com-
pounded of valour and enthusiasm, but also of method
and tenacity ; her charity, which devotes to the
service of the war's victims all those whom any
cause prevents from fighting ; her self-denial, which
finds even in her sacrifice, her mourning and her
tears, new reasons for doing her duty.

Never has France shown herself to the world
in a fairer light. And never, perhaps, has she better
played her historic role than now, when the real

CAUSES OF BELGIUM.'S RESISTANCE 169

character of this gigantic war is gradually revealing
itself. Confronting a predatory Empire, which has
grown and means still to grow by the oppression
of nations weaker than itself and which has only
signed international agreements in order the better
to prepare for its aggressions, France to-day appears
truly as the Champion of the honour and liberty of

all mankind.

* * *

What is a nation ? In a definition that is famous,
Renan replies : " It is a soul, made up of two things :
one in the past — the possession in common of rich
memories ; the other in the present — the will to
continue to preserve in its unity the heritage which
has been received intact."

That a nation is a soul, I admit gladly. But it
is also a body. The nation does not know itself
independently of a sector of the globe whereon it
has been formed and developed, where its children
have in turn lived, worked, loved, fought, suffered,
and where in their turn they repose.

It is not, gentlemen, fitting for me to recall in
your presence to what a degree the living creature
adapts itself to its environment, to what a degree
the modifications of the earth's surface, its fortuitous
features, its heights, its valleys, with their require-
ments and their advantages, influence the groupings
and dispersals of mankind, their thoughts and their
actions.

In so far as regards the Belgian nation, the body

170 THE WAY OF HONOUR

which Nature has given her is a land of forests and
streams which descend, as it were in successive
terraces, from the plateaux of the Ardennes, with
their rocky valleys, down to the great plains of
Condroz, Hesbaye and Hainault, the hills of Brabant,
the polders of Flanders, and the dunes and beaches
of the North Sea.

In the basins of the Meuse and the Scheldt, occupy-
ing, clearing and enriching that soil which it was
compelled to conquer little by little from the great
forests, the marshes and the sea, and which it has
had to defend without ceasing against the hostility
of climate and the covetousness of man, a true nation,
first joining and then commingling the stream of
Franks with that of the ancient Celts, has developed
itself with characteristics both continuous and
organic, and interests and needs altogether peculiar
to itself.

Such is the geographical explanation of this
Belgian nation which thrusts deeply into this soil
its ancient and historical roots.

As to these historical roots, the general public is
far from knowing what they are, or even from sus-
pecting their existence.

Some people supposed, in their simplicity, that
Belgium dated from 1830 ; they were not unlike
those who, upon the word of Boileau, imagined that
French literature begins with Malherbe.

While I was listening to our lecturer a moment
ago, I called to mind a bitter observation of J.-B.

CAUSES OF BELGIUM'S RESISTANCE 171

Nothomb in his admirable work An Historical and
Political Essay upon the Belgian Revolution of 1830.
" For two and a half centuries," he writes, " foreigners
have been distorting our history, and the original
documents by means of which we might be able
to do justice to the memory of our ancestors remain
buried in the archives of Governmental departments.
The history of Belgium would be, if it were truly
written, a long labour of giving credit where credit
is due."

This work of justification we have seen undertaken.
And it is a strange circumstance that one of those
who has been engaged upon it, and one who has
achieved the happiest results, is a German scholar,
Lamprecht, whose main ideas our great Belgian
historians, Kurth and Pirenne, have followed and
developed. No one, perhaps, more clearly than
this learned gentleman (who nevertheless did not
hesitate to sign the " Kolossal " Manifesto of the
ninety-three) has shown that throughout the cen-
turies, in spite of all the vicissitudes which she has
known, Belgium has always remained an historic
and inassimilable personality, distinguished from her
neighbours not only by conditions of existence all
her own, but also by needs and resources, qualities
and defects, which, taken together, stamp her in-
dividuality with a character at once original and
indelible.

In vain was Belgium, during our Middle Ages,
divided, even as were, by the way, the Great Powers

172 THE WAY OF HONOUR

of to-day, into small independent States. These
small States, though dominated by the same political,
economic and social influences, have always been
characterized — in the days of feudalism as under
the communal regime — by the same passions and
similar institutions.

At every critical period of their existence they
have stood firmly together, like a wrought stone
which shows several sides to the world.

From the Flemish to the Walloon districts, from
the country of the weavers to that of the ironworkers
— from one to the other of our industrious and
flourishing cities, which have never ceased, by road
and canal, to exchange their merchandise — the
carillons of our colleges and of our belfries have
hymned the same hopes and the same pride, while
our charters and our " Joyous Entries " expressed,
like so many echoes, the same civic and industrial
liberties.

In vain, during more recent times — after a
moment's national union under Charles the Bold
— was this country drawn within the orbit of this
or that European Power by the laws of royal suc-
cession or through war. Though the foreign master
may have exercised his power over her soil, he has
never either vanquished or possessed her soul.

Our provinces, after the sixteenth century, came
under the authority of sovereigns who were seated
on the thrones of Spain or Austria. But, for our
provinces, these monarchs were only the descendants

CAUSES OF BELGIUM'S RESISTANCE 173

of the Dukes of Brabant or of the Counts of Flanders
and Hainault. They never suffered any one to
pervert the institutions which they had inherited.

We see this clearly under Philip II. We see it
better still under Joseph II, what time our fore-
fathers replied to the pretensions of that Emperor
by that Revolution of Brabant whose motto was
Pro aris et focis — "For our altars and our hearths."
We see it in the Peasants' War. We see it finally
and above all in our Revolution of 1830. And if
so great a success rewarded that Revolution, it was
not owing to the motives by which it was justified,
any more than to the consent which the Powers
gave to it when it had been carried out, or to the
wisdom of the two Leopolds, who consolidated the
tottering fabric. The genuine and essential explana-
tion of that success is that a nationality, whose life-
blood so many vicissitudes had, in the course of
centuries, checked without ever drying it up, insisted,
finally and imperiously, upon its own full and definite
freedom. And if, in August 1914, when upon us
there burst the most terrible of all the Barbarian
invasions, there was heard in Belgium but one cry
and was seen but one movement in defence of Justice
as of honour, if that resistance did not and will not
fail, those who knew our history aright were in no
way surprised. They knew in how vigorous a soil
the Belgian tree had, for long ages, anchored its
sturdy roots.

174 THE WAY OF HONOUR

We speak gladly of what we love. And your
sympathy will excuse me if, after having reminded
you of what are the natural and historical founda-
tions of Belgian nationality, I linger yet a moment
to show you how this nationality derives also from
other causes, which reach, in strange wise, out beyond
its frontiers and are not without their importance
for the destiny of all mankind. These causes are
of both a political and a moral nature.

Let us first consider those that are political.

The destiny of Europe has been the sport, now at
one time, now at another, of two systems. The
first is mad and unsafe. This is Imperialism, that
is to say, the policy of a nation that, drunk with its
own strength or pride, strives to absorb others and
to impose upon them its hegemony or its absolute
dominion. The second is sane and stable : main-
taining a due balance, that is to say, care for the
rights of all and respect for all nationalities.

The first system has several times been tried ;
it has always failed. And following on each check
which it has received, the Law of Equilibrium has
reacted by opposing to defeated covetousness a
stiffer action and a more powerful counterpoise.

It was the traditional task of Belgium, or, more
generally speaking, of the Low Countries, placed as
they were at the crossways of nationality and forming
a cockpit for every one's disputes, to ensure, in that
middle region which they occupied, the maintenance
or the re-establishment of this necessary balance.

CAUSES OF BELGIUM'S RESISTANCE 175

This role of barrier or buffer State Richelieu was
one of the first to understand and to formulate.
While Louis XIV, Danton and Napoleon miscon-
ceived it, Prussia and England did not fail to maintain
it against them. In 1814, Wellington insisted upon
its importance in very definite terms. At the Congress
of Vienna this formula received the approval of all
Europe, and so, with this object in view, the kingdom
of the Low Countries was invented, a feeble device
which was speedily compromised by the events of
1830. Europe, when she agreed, at the Conference
of London, to the destruction of this barrier which
she herself had created, seems to have regarded the
perpetual and guaranteed neutrality of Belgium as
a new development of the principle with which her
own security was bound up.

It is enough to recall these well-known circum-
stances to perceive how closely the interests of
Belgian nationality are interwoven with those of
the Powers, how definitely that nationality is in-
dispensable and, if I may say so, is the very axis.
of the balance of power in Europe.

Our nationality is founded also upon reasons of
morality.

For centuries, owing to her geographical situation
and her political importance, Belgium has served
to some extent as a point of convergence for the
armies of all nations. Not to travel very far back

176 THE WAY OF HONOUR

into history, Seneffe and Fleurus, Neerwinden,
Ramillies and Fontenoy, Jemappes and Waterloo are
all Belgian names. And so Napoleon had good reason
for saying, " Belgium is the battlefield of Europe."

But for a century Belgium had ceased to be that
battlefield, and had become — and now I quote
Elisee Reclus — the school of Europe's experience.

Independent and mistress of herself, full of vigour
and enterprise, first under the guidance of Leopold I,
who has been called the Nestor of kings, then under
that of Leopold II, who so wisely stimulated her
progressive spirit and her national sentiment, she
exhibited, as much in the spheres of politics and
domestic policy as in that of industry, agriculture
and art, many fortunate instances of her initiative,
which expressed her anxiety to reconcile the needs
of her overflowing energy with her respect for her
old traditions and her convictions of the necessity
for advance. Not only had she become the most
densely populated country in the whole world, not
only had her economic production raised her to the
fifth rank, without question, after England, France,
the United States and Germany, but she had lived
orderly and honourably, developing her domestic
institutions upon the most liberal lines, and, as
regarded her neighbours, scrupulously — many have
ventured to say, foolishly — faithful to her inter-
national obligations.

And so, when on the night of Sunday the 2nd of
Atagust 1914 she gave her answer to the outrageous

CAUSES OF BELGIUM'S RESISTANCE 177

bargain which Germany proposed to her, Belgium
was perhaps entitled to point, as she did, to all that
she had done, during eighty-five years, to build up
the civilization of the world. If, on that tragic night,
she accepted war with a formidable adversary, it
was certainly at the bidding of no greed or jealousy ;
it was not from fear, nor from self-interest, nor in
the hope of any revenge, but simply that she might
remain faithful to her engagements and fulfil the
obligations to which she had set her name. And
so it is that to her, where she stands by the side of
the Allies in their fight for Justice and Peace, the
honour has peculiarly fallen of symbolizing, as
against a manifestly and avowedly perjured Power,
respect for that given word which is the very basis
of civilization.

In 1870, the illustrious Gladstone said in the House
of Commons : " Should Belgium be absorbed that
voracious appetites might be satisfied, it would be
to sound the knell of Public and International Law."

These words are echoed to-day by all the most
authoritative voices in both allied and neutral
countries ; and, summing up as it were their opinion,
M. Paul Deschanel said a little time ago at the
Sorbonne : " Belgium is not only the stake of
this struggle, but the pledge of international
righteousness."

Was I not, then, right when I said that our
nationality has not only deep-seated causes, both
geographical and historical, and that it responds

12

178 THE WAY OF HONOUR

not only to the political necessities of Europe, but
also to moral laws of the most absolute kind, laws
which, when the hurricane shall have spent itself,
will require more than ever to be re-established in
the consideration of humanity ?
* * *

Two month ago, disappointed no doubt to witness
the failure, one after the other, of his clumsy attempts
at seduction and his methods of terrorization, General
von Bissing said to a German committee which he
had summoned to Brussels to consider — oh ! admirable
irony ! — the restoration of our historic buildings :
" The character of the Belgians remains for me a
psychological enigma."

A psychological enigma ! I do not, it is true, know
if Herr von Bissing has consulted the vast treatises
which certain masters of Kultur — particularly Wundt,
of Leipzig, another of the ninety-three — have devoted
to the psychology of races. It is possible. But if,
instead of consulting that bookish storehouse of
knowledge, he could learn, from one of the countless
spies whom he maintains amongst us and at our
cost, what the citizens of Belgium are saying to one
another, and above all what they are thinking in
their hearts, where I doubt if contempt for the
invader is not stronger than hate, ah ! how easily this
enigma, which is none, would become solved for him !

At one stroke he would understand why the Belgians
spurned the shameful bargain which would have
enabled them to save themselves alive, but at the

CAUSES OF BELGIUM'S RESISTANCE 179

cost of their honour — why, when it fell upon them
like a bird of prey, the German Army found them
standing against them at Liege and Haelen, at
Waelhem and on the Yser ; why, in the occupied
territory, they allow themselves to be imprisoned,
deported and shot, rather than yield, and that the
enemy may cut off their heads but not bend them ;
why, in their exile, our wandering and ruined families
have never enjoyed a life that was more intense,
more cheerful, more united and more noble, all their
eyes fixed upon their King and their Army ; why,
in that Army, every day, our little soldiers are fighting
valiantly and falling like heroes, their faces to their
own land, and why, each day; new recruits, coming
through a thousand perils from that land, hasten
to fill up the gaps ; why, in spite of its decimated
manhood, its ruined fields, its burned towns, its
starving workmen, there arises from all that people
neither a complaint nor a reproach nor even a sigh
of discouragement ; why, when it hears the noble
declarations of Mr. Asquith and M. Briand and
Signor Orlando, which attest their resolution to hold
fast unto the end, all that people — although for no
other, without doubt, would patience be so meri-
torious a virtue — approves these declarations with
all its energies unanimously resolved on victory.

Ah ! I know it happens at times that we ask
ourselves — and I understand this well — how long
this war, with all the effort and sacrifice and sorrow
which it entails, is to last.

i8o THE WAY OF HONOUR

To this question there is but one reply — the reply
which Abraham Lincoln made to those who put the
same question to him :

" You ask me how long this war must still go on.
It will go on until our task shall have been accom-
plished, until our just cause shall have triumphed.
For it is necessary that our dead shall not have died
in vain ; it is necessary that the Government of the
People by the People and for the People shall have
obtained the certainty that it will not be abolished
off the face of the earth."

And so only when the evil beast shall be conquered
and deprived of its power to hurt, only then, once
more in our homes, proud of having fought by the
side of immortal France for the noblest of all causes,
made greater by these sufferings which we have
together endured and whence a nationality ulti-
mately derives all its unity and all its strength, we
shall be able to resume the tremendous and peaceful
march of our daily work. Then only, as it is written
in the Holy Book, will the iron of lances and swords
serve for the forging of nev, ploughshares and new
reaping-hooks.

THE LIBERTY OF NATIONS

ALMOST in the same way as individuals and families,
the nations are veritable organisms which are born
and grow according to the laws of life. Like the

CAUSES OF BELGIUM'S RESISTANCE 181

members of one body, they are interdependent
each upon the others, and each has its own mission
in the general scheme of Humanity's existence.

This theory, which seems as if it must be a recent
one, is, on the contrary, very ancient. It was dear
to the scholastic philosophy, and we find it as
early as in the Discourse upon Universal History of
Bossuet. But, after the Renaissance, it was success-
fully attacked by the legists and the encyclopaedists.
These men, the victims of their failure to understand
the forces of tradition, led away, too, by abstract
ideas, both the one school and the other sub-
stituted for the theory of nationalities the idea of
the man-automaton whom Reason leads towards
social unification and for whom climates, institutions,
the influences alike of the soil and of history, are
nothing but a fortuitous environment. How, then, is
it that the earlier idea has re-emerged ? Is it the
result of experience ? Is it the effect of the eternal
law of action and reaction ? Is it the fruit of the
teaching of sociologists, among whom, in France,
we may recall the names of Le Play, Tarde and
Le Bon ?

Whatever may be the cause of it, this development
has declared itself more and more strongly in the
politics of France, and particularly since the Second
Empire.

It is strange that, moving in a direction contrary
to that of this development, the science and politics
of Germany, which, at the opening of the nineteenth

i82 THE WAY OF HONOUR

century, so readily embraced the cause of respect
for nationalities, even of the smallest, have both
arrived, under the compulsion of an increasingly
arrogant and shortsighted Imperialism, at complete
justification of the absorption by the Greater States
of the peoples of the third or second rank, which
are regarded henceforth by the Bernhardis and
the Billows as " institutions both miserable and
despicable."

In France, the conception of the Rights of Man
did perhaps cause a little injury to the principle of
nationality. In Germany, this same principle takes
its departure from a totally different philosophy :
the Nietzschean doctrine of the Superman.

In this way, at a distance of two centuries, the
Liberty of Peoples has encountered two enemies
of very different natures. The first of these enemies
is the revolutionary theory, born in France in the
eighteenth century and of which Bonapartist Im-
perialism pretended to be the disseminator. It is
a generous theory, but one that is full of illusions
and misconceptions, since, contrary to the whole
teaching of History, it regards nothing but the indi-
vidual and sees in the individual nothing but a
transient being, innocent of traditions.

The second of these two enemies — and how much
the less noble ! — is that physical realism which
arose in Germany at the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury, and gained ground with a singular rapidity. It
found its beginnings in the University Education,

CAUSES OF BELGIUM'S RESISTANCE 183

whence it has emerged to impose upon all minds,
as an axiom, through Prussian discipline, a new
doctrine and policy founded upon universal deter-
minism. For this doctrine, as for this policy, the
relations which subsist between States — the same
as those which subsist between individuals — are
phenomena which arise out of the struggle for
existence and the survival of the fittest. For them
the rights of races and species, even as the rights
of individuals, are uniquely dependent upon their
vital force.

Before the present war, we all encountered in the
writings of Germans certain brutal declarations
concerning contempt for the weak, the identity of
right with material force, and the necessity that
Germany should absorb the peoples of the second
rank — Switzerland, Holland, Denmark and Belgium.

When we discovered such ideas formulated in
the work of a Tannenberg ; when we read in the
Kulturideal of Adolf Lasson that " the National
State can only realize itself by the destruction of
other States, and this can logically be effected
only by violence " ; when we heard Zarathustra pro-
claim that it is not the just cause which sanctifies
war, but the just war which sanctifies all things —
often we were tempted to see in these things
nothing but the absurdities and paradoxes of a
few madmen, not wholly safe.

In reality, everything which has been printed, or
said or done on the part of our enemies since the

184 THE WAY OF HONOUR

end of July 1914 has proved to us that this mon-
strous philosophy is to-day the fundamental base
of German thought. It is upon it that has been
built up the aggressive Imperialism with which we
are at war.

In the speech which he made in the Reichstag
on the I2th of December 1916, Herr von Bethmann
Hollweg dared to assert : " They (the Central Empires)
have not for an instant ceased to believe that respect
for the rights of others is, in any degree, incom-
patible with their own rights and their legitimate
interests." Well, we must take the exact reverse
of this impudent declaration if we are to appreciate
the true causes and at the same time the veritable
stake of this great conflict. In reality, German
Imperialism stands on the one side, and the Liberty
of Nations on the other. These are the adversaries
which to-day confront each other.

Stripped of all the subterfuge and lies of diplo-
macy, German Imperialism — and it is for this reason
that it is, philosophically, so inferior to the Bona-
partist Imperialism and the Internationalism upon
which a certain school is based — is nothing in the
world but that instinct of rapine and violence which
lies deep within every carnivorous beast.

Events have shown both the virtues and the
errors of the metaphysical dreams of the French
Revolution. As for that physical realism which
Pan-Germanism has sought, by a formidable and
unexpected assault, to impose upon the world, its

CAUSES OF BELGIUM'S RESISTANCE 185

fate is being decided at this moment and that fate
is no longer in doubt.

What new theory of the relations which subsist
between men will the evolution of ideas bring us
to-morrow ? " It was necessary/' says Melchior
de Vogue, in his famous Remarks upon the Centenary
Exhibition, " that a moral principle, representing
the reaction of the conscience against the harshness
of natural law, should come to soften so much
as might be intolerable in a legislation which the
teaching of physiology alone had inspired."

For this moral principle, which will provide a
solid basis for assisting the weak, for paying respect
to liberty and the rights of others, we shall look in
vain, I believe, save in the Christian conception of
social life. It is this principle which we have
honoured, in March 1917, in the Message of President
Wilson announcing the entry of the United States
into the war.

And without this principle, the Society of Nations
must remain forever a myth and a snare.

SIGHTS AND LESSONS
OF THE WAR

WITH THE FRENCH ARMY

I HAVE been invited — and the invitation is a very
flattering one — to say, on the first page of this album,
so moving to us who are living to-day, what I think
of the French nation at war.1 . . . The most enthusi-
astic sentiments are not always the easiest to
analyse. . . . While I pause for a moment to dis-
entangle in my own mind and arrange with some
regularity the causes of an admiration and a love
which I feel more deeply every day, a literary
memory arises suddenly before me.

You may remember that charming incident in
Sterne's Tristram Shandy where Uncle Toby, who
is deeply impressed by the merits and graces of Mrs.
Wadman, asks his honest friend, Corporal Trim,
who, like himself, has been wounded in the wars, to
bring him a piece of paper, a large piece, so that he
may thereon write down methodically a list of those
perfections which he has discovered in the charming
widow. The corporal obeys, places the paper before
him, takes a pen and dips it in the inkpot.

" She has a thousand virtues," says my Uncle
Toby.

1 Documents of the Photographical Section of the French
Army.

186

SIGHTS AND LESSONS OF THE WAR 187

" Sir," says the corporal, " do you wish me to
write them all ? "

The corporal dips his pen a second time in the
inkpot and waits.

And my uncle, after having reflected, shows him
with the end of his pipe the upper left-hand corner
of his paper and dictates this word, which the corporal
writes down in large letters — Humanity.

Humanity. Yes, that is the word. Vague though
it be, this word sums up of itself the greater part
of the deep-rooted traditions and the essential
characteristics of French civilization. All that makes
for cleanliness and honour in man, who is created in
the image of God but who does not take himself
for a god, all that distinguishes the honourable and
free man from the beast, the monster and the
superman, all this is to be found contained in this
single word.

Humanity, that is to say, sincerity, purity and
courage ; the sense of what is just and true ; courtesy
and tolerance, kindness and care for others, tact
and compassion.

Look at it more closely still : this word excludes
all those special features of Kultur, the hideousness
of which the war reveals to us each day to a greater
degree ; for instance, the stupidity of the bull, the
passion for quantity always dominating that for
quality, the spirit of lying, of obscurity and of

i88 THE WAY OF HONOUR

servility, the science without conscience, and, above
all — above all — a colossal pride, the pride of the
wicked angels.

In his book, In the Service of Germany, a Prussian
non-commissioned officer writes : "Ah, sir, they
may well say that the French have more humanity
than other peoples."

Here at any rate is one Boche who sees clearly.
While Prussia has never fought save for the most
cynically selfish reasons, and to-day even in her
peace proposals — neither more nor less than the
war aims which she announced during the first days
of her aggression — we do not see thought for others
weigh so much as an atom in the balance of her
intentions, History always shows us France inspired
by humane ideals. Whether it is a question of
delivering the tomb of Christ or of propagating the
Rights of Man, France never hesitates to fight for
causes greater than herself. How many countries —
the United States, Belgium, Greece, Italy and still
others — owe to her in no small measure the enjoy-
ment of a free existence ! But tell me, where is
the nation, great or small, which is beholden in
anything to Prussia for its liberty, its independence
or its happiness ?

The literature of France is humane — humane as
the polished and amiable society of which it is the
mirror. Her science is no less so ; it revolts against
pedantry, and if it studies matter in all its mar-
vellous manifestations, it understands its limitations

SIGHTS AND LESSONS OF THE WAR 189

too well to pretend to make of it the sole rule of
conduct. :< To be a man ; to be one as completely and
as profoundly as possible, not in any way to force, to
strain, or to lessen human nature ; to respect it in
oneself and in others ; to accept its limitations and
to reconcile its contradictory elements " — it is by
this formula that M. Victor Giraud defines the ideal
which French philosophy has made its own and
which it propagates throughout the world. And,
truly, this definition is an admirable one.

Shall I add that France is humane in her Army ?
Here, officers and soldiers are still men — men whose
soul and heart never abandon wholly the rights of
the individual. Men who think, who suffer, who have
will — and in whom all the qualities of the intellect
and of the affections, ennobled by the sentiment of
military duty, attain to their fairest development.

Before the war, a comparison in which the traveller
pleasantly indulged — but without seizing upon the
whole moral interest of it — was that between a
march of French piou-pious on the plain of Long-
champ or even through the boulevards of Paris,
and that of a Wachtparade at Berlin. On the one
hand was the French method, wherein there is
nothing affected or formal. Look, carriage, gait —
all is natural. These men who march past so reso-
lutely to the sound of their bugles have inborn
within them the sense of freedom and measure.

190 THE WAY OF HONOUR

On the other hand, the Teutonic manner. The
shrill fifes mark the time for the stiff right-angled
movements and mechanical but laboured gestures
of veritable automata, with fixed, harsh faces.
Here the man is nothing but a number, a unit
functioning among a herd. In France there exists
a personnel whose individual qualities contribute
to the harmony of the whole. And the same
contrast is to be perceived in the relations main-
tained between the officers and the men. In
Prussia, the servility of the soldier has its com-
plement in the brutality of the officer and the
non-commissioned officer. In France, the neces-
sary discipline never wholly excludes a certain
wholesome familiarity ; and it is a charming and
inimitable thing, this instinctive and finely graded
delicacy which, exercised by superiors to their in-
feriors, wins respect and affection, and, according
to circumstances of time and place, emphasizes
distinctions of rank, diminishes them or even effaces
them altogether.

But how was this soldier, whom we knew to be a
thoroughly human fighter, spirited and enthusiastic
in battle, capable of every sacrifice and even of every
heroic folly when inspired by the glitter of weapons
and the intoxication of the charge — how was he to
accommodate himself to the new methods which the
enemy, after having seen the first vigour of his attack
broken, was to impose during months and years
upon all the armies of this tremendous war ? His

SIGHTS AND LESSONS OF THE WAR 191

temperament disposed him to the offensive and the
" smashing " of his foe. And the training of his
military schools rightly allowed, in the formation
of a command, for the admitted superiority of this
" furia francesa." Well, it was now in no way a
question of the classic "furia," but of a war at once
stagnant, cunning and ferocious, a war of four
dimensions — submarine and subterranean, on the
surface and in the air — wherein mechanical, physical
and chemical science has suddenly modified the rules
of strategy, as profoundly as it has, since the
beginning of the nineteenth century, transformed
the conditions of industry. Instead of the assault
of Constantine and the charge of Reischoffen, it
had become necessary for the soldier to resign
himself, when face to face with an enemy solidly
entrenched and supported by a powerful artillery,
to live, like him, the life of moles and ants.
Success is no longer only to the troops who
shall show the greatest " bite," but to those
who shall have the best arranged tunnels, the
most rapid machine-guns, the most powerful
cannon, the most numerous aeroplanes, and the
most destructive gas. In the heart of slaughtered
towns and whole shattered country-sides, cavalry
and infantry are reduced to walking, working and
holding their places, in mud or in a dust mingled
with filthy rubbish, digging trenches and parallels,
filling sand-bags and weaving wire entanglements.
Devoured by the flies in summer, by the rats in

I92 THE WAY OF HONOUR

winter, by vermin at all seasons, deafened, hustled,
infected with disease, one of their only amusements
— if they have a trained ear — is to recognize amidst
the uproar of the shells and shrapnel, of which
they get their full share, the calibre of the pro-
jectiles which follow and answer one another — the
small for finding the range, the great explosives,
bursting on the ground, to smash it and tear it up,
the large shrapnel, bursting in the air, to finish off
the wounded.

No one will imagine that this sort of war is very
much to their taste. They find it almost brutalizing.
" Our health is good and our moral too," writes
Captain Augustin Cochin, " but there is nothing
for the intellect to do." And a simple poilu, Jean
Variot, to whom we owe an admirable little book on
the Bois le Pretre, remarks also : " For us French,
every task which does not consist in driving ahead,
in risking one's skin with a laugh, appears to us
interminable. That is how we are made ! " No
matter ! they do their part — enduring being shelled
included — with a carelessness that is perfectly simple
and an ignorance — which is really sublime — of their
own greatness. Read this bit of a letter written to
his young wife, from the bottom of a trench, in the
spring of 1916 and five days before he was killed,
by Pierre-Maurice Masson, who had just finished
his thesis of Literary History under the shell fire
and under the nose of the Boches : "I am almost
ashamed to feel so happy in the trenches, when I

SIGHTS AND LESSONS OF THE WAR 193

think of all that you are suffering far from my
side. Here there is nothing, even to the thought
of danger, which is not a tonic. Duty appears
a little hard, but plain and marked out like the
trenches themselves. All the men who are living
in this austere, narrow, deep and bristling world
know well, they too, that they may not emerge from
it except by command ; that which confines their
steps, confines also their dreams and their desires ;
they only wish to do what they have to do ; they
do not feel that they are dragged hither and
thither, as when they are resting, by contra-
dictory thoughts ; they are wholly devoted to their
service, and one sees in their faces that firm, clean
and decided look which of itself is a comfort. . . .
A collective soul moves through this underground
labyrinth — the spirit of courage and pride." The
order to go over the parapet comes. The French
soldier, for whom, say what one may, the trench is
a weariness, finds himself at last under the open sky
and upon ground where he can go forwards, with
his best native qualities freed ; and the enemy also
finds him thus, if he has the temerity to wait for
him. " Let every man, before advancing, have
cast his heart over the parapet." This order which
General Nivelle gave to his troops at Verdun — this
order which is, by the way a marvellous motto for
any man's life — explains for us the whole psychology
of the French Army of to-day and of those who are
in command of it. Leaders and soldiers understand

13

194 THE WAY OF HONOUR

one another. The former have the gift of making
their will human, I was about to say lovable. And
this is why the latter obey and devote themselves
whole-heartedly, without any interior revolt, with
no machine-gun behind them, nor the bludgeon nor
the oaths of the Feldwebel.

The community of patriotic duty weaves between
the French officer and the humblest soldier under
his orders a bond almost fraternal. This bond is
stronger than death. Who can read, without being
stirred to the core of his being, this letter — and one
could find thousands of others just like it — in which
Lieutenant Pierre de Gailhard-Bancel announced
to a simple peasant woman, the wife of one of his
soldiers, the loss which had befallen her : " Your
dear Louis, my brother-in-arms, I weep for him
with you at this moment. He fell by my side like
the gallant soldier he was, mortally wounded by
a ball in the chest. ... It was on the 28th of
September at five o'clock in the evening that he
fell, killed instantly. The battle in which we were
concerned continued. I was forced also to continue
to lead my men further away, but I wished that
he should lie in consecrated ground. I caused two
of his comrades to dig a grave by night in the
cemetery. I watched myself by his side, I joined
his hands, thinking of you, and I could not keep
back my tears as for the last time I gazed on his
face, so sweet and tranquil that one would have
said he slept. It is this which makes me suppose

SIGHTS AND LESSONS OF THE WAR 195

that he did not suffer a moment. You see, madame,
that I have done for him what I would have done
for my brother. It is true that it was as a brother
that I loved him, that we all loved him in the
company, and seeing him no longer by my side I
feel myself alone and helpless."

Ah ! good soldier of France, all honesty, all frank-
ness, all courage, how vain are words to tell you
with what admiration we shall all, always, regard
you ! I know besides that you are suspicious of
phrases and that you readily leave to your faithful
companion, chaff, the care of replying — and smartly
— to the praises which the " brass-hats " bestow
upon you. And it is for this reason that I would
confine myself here to expressing something of
what, for their French comrades, the soldiers of
my own country feel, the men of the Belgian Army,
militiamen of the old classes, volunteers of the
first days of the war, young beardless recruits
escaped out of the occupied territory through
barrages and rifle shots. Through not having had
long preparation for their military life, they are
good judges of it. Truly they are a little slow of
speech, but what they say has generally strong
common sense behind it. No doubt their aversion
for what they call " manners " and " pose " leads
them into a certain carelessness of conduct, but
their heart is in the right place, and it is no less

I96 THE WAY OF HONOUR

resolutely faithful to orders than to the friend-
ships of its choice. All this, together with their
exploits at Liege and on the Yser, and the valour
with which they have fought, now for more than
thirty months, separated from everything they love
— all this gives perhaps some value to the opinion of
our " jas " — to call them by that short, drawling
word by which the Belgian soldiers call themselves —
a word which evokes at once their accent, their
carriage, their decision and their simplicity.

What do they think of the French soldier ? If
you ask them, they reply with an expressive gesture
and a smile. " Chic types," they will reply without
hesitation. And this bit of international slang —
with the accent which is here given to it — says the
more because it says so little. In it one divines
at once the admiration of our " jas " for the mili-
tary virtues of the French soldier, for his native
elegance, for his courage, quick and patient, which
" makes no bones about it," and for his inex-
haustible spirit, which with a jest can console itself
for any privation.

Good soldier of France, you who have come from
all the fields, all the cities, all the streams, all the
plains, and all the hills of the Garden of the Earth,
you are truly the son of a sane and generous land.
You are truly the son of this clever and chivalrous
race, whose civilization has shone out upon the two
worlds.

Such as, in the noblest hours of our meditations,

SIGHTS AND LESSONS OF THE WAR 197

we have imagined the role of the modern soldier
to be, placing unreservedly his moral and physical
energies at the service of a truly just cause, even
as such we admire you and bless you to-day in this
tremendous war which your ideals dominate and which
your genius is leading irresistibly towards victory.

Good soldier of France, standing in all your
strength against the tottering Barbarian, it is not
enough to say that all the soldiers of the Great
Entente owe you, each day, a debt for the strength
which you lend to their courage by the certainty, the
energy and the very gaiety of your own !

This courage — which has the noble modesty of its
tears, its blood and its sacrifices — makes the whole
world your debtor, since it assures to the men of
to-morrow all that is comprised in the self-respect,
the happiness and even the motive of living.

AMERICAN SYMPATHY

A speech delivered on the 22nd of February 1915 at
a meeting arranged by the American Club of
Paris on Washington's Birthday.

YOUR EXCELLENCY, MONSIEUR LE PRESIDENT

GENTLEMEN,

Why should I not admit it ? It is with veritable
delight that I have seized this occasion which you
have offered to me, by inviting me so kindly to this

198 THE WAY OF HONOUR

meeting, of bringing to you, and in your persons to
all your fellow-countrymen, the tribute of gratitude
which Belgium owes to the Great American Re-
public. It is to me a double pleasure to offer you
this homage in this fair land of France, whose noble
traditions of hospitality you have just been praising
so justly, because you have, like us, had experience
of them.

Our debt to the United States is of long standing.
What is a nation ? A collective being, distinct
from others, and formed by individuals who are
born side by side, and who live, work and suffer
in common.

Looking at it in this way, what a difference do
we see between these two beings ! On the one hand
a vast State with the Atlantic and the Pacific as its
frontiers, to which a still young race and a territory
that has barely begun to be exploited assure a
marvellous prosperity to-day, and, in the future,
infinite possibilities. On the other hand, this little
country, where, on our ancient soil, narrowly re-
stricted in area and with capacities that are fully
known, a population has dwelt for centuries, over-
abundant, rich in tradition, rich in the monuments
and treasures of art, and which, knowing nothing of
its future, suffers to-day the bitterest wrongs and
the most unjust sorrows.

These two countries are, without doubt, very
different from one another. Each of them has its
special features, its essential characteristics. Yet

SIGHTS AND LESSONS OF THE WAR 199

the ties which, under the name of patriotism, attach
us, both Americans and Belgians, to our respective
homelands, are woven, for you as for us, out of
the same fibres of the intellect and the affections.
The web is equally close. The tissue is equally
pure. It is owing to the same ardent desire for
justice, the same sacred respect for individual liberty,
the same care for a sane democracy, the same love
of work and the same thirst for progress, that our
country takes rank, after your own, England, France
and Germany, as the fifth economic Power of
the world. It is the same spirit of close concord
between provinces and citizens which is expressed
alike in your motto " E pluribus unum " and in
ours, " L 'union fait la force."

What an agreeable task, gentlemen, it would
be for me — and how easy, had I the time — to show
you with what care the Belgians, when they en-
deavoured to win their independence in 1789 — and
in 1830 when they achieved it — studied all that
your forefathers had done and how powerfully,
together with that of France, the example of the
United States contributed to inspire their actions
and to decide their destiny.

But it is not into the past that we must look if
we are to find the reasons which we have for loving
you, for admiring you and for being grateful to
you. For six months now, we have been living
in the midst of the most frightful crisis that has
ever overtaken the modern world. And by an

200 THE WAY OF HONOUR

extraordinary paradox, the only victim in this
war of Titans, up to the present, has been a little
country, our own, which has been brutally attacked
by a formidable military Power which had promised
it its protection and sworn to guarantee its
safety

With what enthusiasm, with what generosity
have you lavished upon us your sympathy ! It is
true that your country has remained neutral in
this war. But we, too, were a neutral country !
If we are suffering, it is precisely because we were
resolved to abide faithfully by our neutrality, which
was not simply voluntary, but which had been
imposed upon us as a condition of our inter-
national existence.

It is because we did not betray our duty, because
we preferred honour to life itself, that to-day, to
punish us, they are burning our homes, decimating
our people and blackening our character.

Confronted with this spectacle, the Americans,
who are honourable people, have not remained un-
affected. In the month of September last I was
sent by King Albert on a mission to the President
of the United States in order to explain our situation
to him. I remember that one day, at Washington,
one of the leading members of the Government,
who had called upon me, but had not found me
at home, wrote on his card these simple words :
" Neutral, but bravo for the Belgians ! " I know that
that is the sentiment which moves you also. You

SIGHTS AND LESSONS OF THE WAR 201

do not believe that neutrality ought to be cowardice,
nor that " neutral " should be a synonym for
" poltroon." Between humanity and barbarism,
between honour and perjury, where is the soul
with any pride in it which would resign itself to
an indifference that borders upon complicity ?

And this American sympathy which has so greatly
cheered us, has not, I thank God, remained merely
platonic. Every day our population, hemmed in
by starvation, is experiencing its kindly effects.
And in what words, here, could I adequately express
our gratitude ? The cries of our little children
who were hungry and whom you have fed, the tears
of our poor mothers who sa\v death sitting down
by their hearths, and whom you have reassured —
there is your reward ! I do not believe that history
has ever witnessed anything more noble or which
has done more to cleanse humanity from the stain
of so many horrors of which others to-day are in-
curring the guilt, than the spectacle of your great
nation which, from beyond the ocean, without any
compulsion, unless it be that of its heart, is helping
to assure material existence to a population of
more than seven million inhabitants, at the very
hour when another Empire, which, on its part,
had sworn to protect us, is oppressing us, starving
us and calumniating us.

That is a thing — that act of brotherhood, that
noble intervention of your Legation at Brussels
and of its admirable head, Mr. Brand Whitlock,

202 THE WAY OF HONOUR

of whom I may be allowed here to express my
kindliest recollections — that is a thing which, happen
what may, we shall never forget. Last Thursday,
at Liege, that energetic town, the whole population
expressed this same gratitude to your nation.
Every bosom displayed the American colours.
We hear that, jealous no doubt of the tribute
wherein they read a lesson, silent, but how elo-
quent ! the Germans tore those emblems away.
We heard, at the same time, that under this
new outrage our fellow-countrymen suffered almost
as deeply as in the day when the invader pro-
scribed our own colours.

All homage to the American flag ! All homage,
too, to that noble figure of George Washington,
whose memory this meeting specially recalls.

Three months since, in company of two of my
compatriots, Messrs. Hymans and Vandervelde, I
made, and it was not for the first time, the pilgrimage
to Mount Vernon. What were our sensations when
we saw appear, at a turn of the Potomac River,
that noble and beautiful little house wherein dwells
the memory of your illustrious ancestor ! What was
our emotion also as we laid upon the tomb of this
hero a wreath wherewith your colours and ours
were interwoven, and upon which we had had these
words written : " Independent Belgium to George
Washington, founder of American Independence " !
But what, above all, were our feelings when, as we
entered the hall of this house which has become

SIGHTS AND LESSONS OF THE WAR 203

for you all, as it was for Washington, a home, we
saw, among so many souvenirs piously preserved
and by the side of relics offered formerly to the
General by his friend La Fayette, a trophy of five
swords ! They were the swords which he be-
queathed to his nephews. And under this trophy
there stand, reproduced from his will, these lines :
" I bequeath to you these five swords. Never
draw them to shed blood, unless in your own legiti-
mate defence or in that of your country and her
rights. And in such a case, never sheathe them ;
fall and die with your arms in your hands, rather
than abandon them or deliver them up."

Ah ! but we understood that lesson ! What
Washington advised, that is what we mean to do,
that is what our beloved King is doing now at our
head. Michelet said of Kleber : " His face is so
much a soldier's, that one grows brave simply by
looking at it." In his turn, Paul Bourget said lately
of King Albert that one grew more honourable
simply by thinking of him. For he is of the moral
stock of your own George Washington.

In the name of my King, in the name of the
Belgian Government, I salute, gentlemen, in you,
the noble American nation ; and I ask you, as it
were, to personify my tribute of respect and
gratitude by saluting the name of the eminent
man to whom the great American Republic has
confided the direction of her destinies.

204 THE WAY OF HONOUR

THE MORAL TEACHING OF THE WAR

A speech delivered at the Congress of the Society of
Social Economics and the Unions of Social Peace,
held in Paris on the $th of June 1916. *

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, —

The poet of the Metamorphoses threatens the man
who has been surrounded with friends in his pros-
perity with finding himself all alone in the hour
when the sky of his fortunes grows dark.

What a denial has the present lot of Belgium
given to this cynical piece of wisdom ! The friends
who have hastened to approve our conduct, to com-
fort us and to support us, owe their value at once to
their quality and their number. They would suffice,

1 There were present : Messrs. H. Carton de Wiart, Minister
of Justice and President of the Congress ; Paul Nourrisson,
President of the Society of Social Economics ; Rene Bazin,
of the Academic Fran9aise ; Auguste Isaac, Honorary Presi-
dent of the Lyons Chamber of Commerce ; F. Lepelletier,
Secretary General of the Society of Social Economics and
of the Unions of Social Peace.

There were also on the platform : Messrs. G. Blondel and
P. du Maroussem, Vice-Presidents of the Society ; G. Ardant,
Aug. Bechaux, Maurice Dufourmantelle, Fay, H. Joly, of
the Institute ; Hubert Valleroux, Prache, Louis Riviere,
Baron des Rocours, Souchon, R. Stourm, of the Institute,
members of the Executive ; the Count de Las Cases,
Senator ; J. Lerolle, Deputy ; J. Jamet, doyen of the Faculty
of Law ; L. Devin, its former President and President of
the Central Office of Charitable Works ; and Marion, Professor
of the College of France.

SIGHTS AND LESSONS OF THE WAR 205

were it necessary, to maintain and strengthen in
our hearts that inflexible patience and resolution
which the love of Right and Justice has aroused
within them.

Of this comfortable sympathy France, more than
any other nation in the world, is giving in full mea-
sure. She is doing it with a generosity and a deli-
cacy which are her own peculiar possessions. And
for my part I find new proof of this in the very
flattering invitation which has brought me here
to-day, in the reception which has been accorded to
me by an assemblage at once so large and so select,
and in those words of welcome which have gained a
peculiar value from the moral and scientific authority
of a name doubly renowned and doubly respected.
May I add that of all these precious words I do not
dream of applying so much as one to myself, but
that I accept them all, with the deepest gratitude,
on behalf of my steadfast and struggling country ?

Allow me also to apply some of them, as your
eminent President himself has not failed to do, to
the Society of Social Economics of Belgium.

It was born under the protection of your own —
and from its earliest moments you have given it the
benefit of that delightfully intimate influence which I
may be permitted, I hope, at the opening hour of this
Congress, which is to occupy itself with family life,
and especially with French family life, to emphasize

206 THE WAY OF HONOUR

as one of the greatest benefits, while it is one of the
least visible, of all good domestic organization.

I mean the influence of the elder sister or brother,
which in no way contends with the authority of the
parent, but which has in it, nevertheless, something
of the father's power and the mother's tenderness.
Since this influence is less stern and less austere, the
affection which it inspires may, without weakening
itself, receive the most insignificant confidences. Its
indulgence is not called upon, as is that of the parent,
to keep itself constantly on guard against all tempta-
tions to weakness. Occupying a low place in the
life of the family, on a level with its own generation,
it sees from less high and more close a standpoint
the detail of things, and often comprehends, better
than any one standing outside could do, the heavy
sorrows and the small troubles to which, but yester-
day, it was itself a victim.

But, above all, what a power of example, for good
or for evil, is that which the elder brother has over
the younger ! Ask it of these little girls who watch
so closely, even when we least suspect it, the ways,
the words, even the thoughts of their elder sisters.
Ask it, above all, of the meditations and resolves of
this schoolboy who, his eyes already open to the
claims of duty and his heart already swelling with
heroic thoughts, moves along the street by the side
of his big soldier-brother, back on leave, has his own
pride in those stripes, or that military cross, and
.to-morrow will endeavour to reproduce in his still

SIGHTS AND LESSONS OF THE WAR 207

childish games the labours and the deeds of which
his elder brother will have told him.

This benevolent influence your institution, older by
some years, has never ceased to exert upon our own.

Strengthened by your brotherly affection, your
support and your example, the Society of Social
Economics of Belgium has grown up faithful as
yourselves to the principles and methods of Le Play.
Of the just fame which you owe to so many names
that are great in social science and social reform,
of the legitimate authority which attaches to you
from your researches and your discussions, we have
enjoyed the reflection, I may say the warmth and
the splendour.

So it is that our Society has long taken its place
among the foremost learned institutions of our
country, and has had the honour to see, closely
interested in its work, while he conscientiously pre-
pared himself for his kingly role, a young prince
in whom our nation loved, even before the war,
to behold personified these qualities of reflection
and of goodwill, of honour, and energy which she
desired for herself. It is around that prince that
to-day she stands wholly united, quivering and
undaunted, ready to defend her rights and to set
her hearthstone free.

So it is that the Society has contributed to the
birth and growth of other societies of every kind
which, under the warm sun of the liberty of associa-
tion, have emerged out of our old soil to forrn^i

208 THE WAY OF HONOUR

vegetation singularly vigorous and varied : societies
for education and the promotion of good morals,
benevolent societies, as those for mutual aid,
thrift, co-operation, friendly societies, and other
charitable bodies.

So it is that our Society has put its stamp upon
the legislation of a country which has been placed
by nature at the crossways of the great races and the
great nations, and which, as Reclus has said, has
become the School of Europe after having for long
been what it was fated again to become — its battle-
field. This stamp, as you know, is that of old
tradition. It demands from individual effort, from
the constitutional organization of work, and only to a
lesser degree from the law (which, according to the
fine definition of Cheysson, is the conscience of those
who have none), the secret of that social harmony
for which the self-deceivers of the first three-quarters
of the nineteenth century looked from the conflict
of interests and the free play of egoisms, while
another and more recent school, obsessed by the
desire for equality, pretended to discover it in the
socialization of all the means of production.

Careful to safeguard the power of the family tie,
which best binds the citizen to the city, our Society
has helped to introduce into our legislation, from
the standpoint of interests which are especially
those of your Congress, certain ideas which to that
Congress are dear : the double vote of the head of
the family, respect for his freedom in the matter

SIGHTS AND LESSONS OF THE WAR 209

of education, the suppression of the forced division
of inheritances, exoneration from taxes of the work-
man's dwelling, division of military service between
families, the protection of children and working
women, and instruction, both domestic and profes-
sional.

In this way it has played a part — a quite disin-
terested part — in the unending common task of
bringing order among the pulsating forces of our
young nationality, of regularizing the circulation of
the sap through all its branches and of assuring to
it full growth towards health and prosperity.

You will not complain, I hope, if I say a word
or two, as about a memory of yesterday and a vision
of to-morrow, concerning the meetings which, each
fortnight, brought together the members of our
Society of Social Economics. With what pleasure
they used to find themselves in Brussels in that
ancient and picturesque Hotel de Cleves-Ravenstein,
there on the hill of the Caudenburg. In the Court
of Honour, all rich as it is with its old ivy, the
greetings which were exchanged seemed to borrow
a certain gravity from the beauty of its rather severe
decoration. They became still more discreet in
the lower hall, with its deep-set windows, which so
admirably exemplify the Romanesque style of the
Burgundian period, and its wainscoting, its chimney-
piece, its rafters which repeat, endlessly, this rather
mysterious motto : " Plus est en vous " (More is
in you).

14

210 THE WAY OF HONOUR

Ever solicitous for the fortunes of a society which
was the work of his own hands, and just as eager
to act as to efface himself, the permanent Secretary,
M. Victor Brants, was always the first to arrive.
His was the task of arranging the meetings and
the discussions, reviving the enthusiasm of the
older members, bringing forward the new recruits
and cherishing the sacred flame of toil and fellow-
ship. The Society's year closed always with some
instructive expedition, and often one or another of
your members lent to this the attraction of his
presence.

A few years before the war the Society, of which
at the time I had the honour to be President, decided
to make an excursion into Westphalia and Rhenish
Prussia. At Munchen-Gladbach we visited textile
factories and metal-works, and the famous Volks-
verein of which Dr. Karl Sonnenschein explained
to us the machinery and working, not without in-
dulging in very many compliments to Belgium,
whose role in the social laboratory he praised highly.
We also went to Dusseldorf, and then to Cologne,
where we examined certain types of workmen's
dwellings and certain institutions created by the
Imperial Bureau of Compulsory Industrial Insurance.
Besides the officials who received us there, there were
some members of the German Centre party and of
the German clergy, who did not fail to eulogize the
University of Louvain, of which M. Victor Brants
was, amongst us, the particular representative.

SIGHTS AND LESSONS OF THE WAR 211

What did they think, what did they say, these
our hosts of yesterday, on the morrow of that
unnameable night of the 26th of August 1914, when
the German Army, by order of its leaders, deliber-
ately and methodically fired the town of Louvain,
delivering to the flames, at the same time as
the beautiful College of Saint-Pierre, our University
Halls, and, close to them, the rich Library of the
University, with its collections, its old printed books,
its unedited manuscripts, its records, its gallery of
glories from the first days of its foundation, portraits
of Rectors, of Chancellors, of illustrious scholars,
" with the sight of which/' as Cardinal Mercier says,
who was there so long a professor, " masters and
pupils steeped themselves in a noble tradition and
gained fresh energy for their work " ; all that accu-
mulation of wealth, both intellectual, historical and
artistic, the fruit of five centuries of toil for ever
blotted out !

During the following days, while the flames,
skilfully maintained, devoured everything, in every
direction, those inhabitants who escaped from the
fusillades and the burnings were, some, to the
number of eight thousand, shut up in a riding-
school, too small for such a crowd, and con-
sequently the theatre of horrible scenes of
death and madness ; others, in herds of several
thousands, were driven out towards Brussels
and Campenhout at the head of German troops,
while others still were crowded into cattle-trucks

212 THE WAY OF HONOUR

and despatched into Prussia. Ten thousand unfor-
tunates among whom were old men, women and
children, priests and nuns, sick people, madmen
escaped from their asylums, were hunted by a
drunken soldiery along the road to Tirlemont,
already heaped with the corpses of civilians.
Harassed, cursed, stripped, they had nothing left,
as a witness says, but their eyes to weep with.
Victor Brants was of this last group ; and if
he succeeded earlier than others in escaping from
that woeful procession, it was only to learn the
news of the still more tragic massacres of Dinant,
Aerschot, Andenne and Tamines, and the cowardly
murder of two of his colleagues of the University,
Professor Lenerz, of the Grand Duchy of Luxem-
bourg, and M. Honore Ponthiere, a learned and
generous-hearted man of the first distinction and
of whom I am honoured to have been the friend.

To all this, these German intellectuals have an-
swered, as you know : " It is not true that our
troops have brutally destroyed Lou vain."

The members of the Centre have joined their
voices to those of the perjured and the murderers.
Worse still, a certain number of them, brought in
the wagons of the invader, have installed them-
selves amongst us, at once accepting or taking their
parts in the system of exactions, pillage, persecu-
tion, attempts at sowing dissension, and slander, of
which our country is still the victim.

That same Dr. Sonnenschein, who came as a war

SIGHTS AND LESSONS OF THE WAR 213

correspondent of a Cologne newspaper, has been
so good as to declare, it is true, that he did not
believe the myth of the francs-tireurs organized by
our village priests. But I have not discovered that
he has written a word of even discreet criticism upon
all the crimes which he must have verified, while
he has not feared to assert, as a thing manifest, that
Belgium had, before the war, violated her own
neutrality for the advantage of the Triple Entente.

Ah ! when all this intoxication of lies and pride
has vanished away — and it will soon pass — how will
these learned persons, who have not even the excuse
of the soldier who acts under orders and with the
fever of invasion in his blood, how will they keep
themselves from a shudder of shame and fear ?

I ask your pardon for having lingered so long on
such horrors. But how may I drive away the vision
of them or forget this destruction of so many lives,
of so much beauty, before which the believer is
surprised into saying with the poet :

Dans les deux, au deld de la sphere des nues,

Peut-etre faites-vous des choses inconnues

Ou la douleur de I'homme entre comme Element. . . .

But while it is allowed to us to feel the atrocity
of this war, it is above all things necessary that
we should be the masters of our emotions, discipline
our nerves and strain every effort in the prosecu-
tion of our duty : the duty of to-day and the duty

214 THE WAY OF HONOUR

of to-morrow. If it is impossible for us to turn
away our thoughts and our eyes from the field of
battle and slaughter, we must look beyond this fore-
ground and visualize the future too. It is not
enough that this horror should awake impressions
within us, for this asks nothing save of our eyes and
our ears. It must also bring to birth in us ideas —
and more than ideas — resolves, so that the benefit
of so much sacrifice and heroism be not lost for
mankind and that, from to-day, that programme
of restoration and reform which is imposed upon
us all should be prepared in the field of morals as
in that of economics.

And is not this, besides, the question which to-
day excites our curiosity and our goodwill ?

Of what is to-morrow to be made ?

Philosophers, moralists, journalists, preachers, bring
their reply to the Sphinx. Some project into the
future the reflection of to-day's anxieties. Others
see it through the prism of a glowing imagination.
Many yield to the temptation, a common one with
the wisest of us, of attributing to the coming genera-
tion the virtues which they have failed to discern
in their own contemporaries, and then discount
the realization in the future of formulae which they
have not been able to realize in the past.

One view, largely held, is that, after the war,
there will be a complete revolution in the moral and
social order. It has been said : " It is a whole
world which will vanish away, in the eruption of

SIGHTS AND LESSONS OF THE WAR 215

this volcano and under the floods of its lava waves,
spewed up from the depths. The longer the war
lasts, the more wholly will this world crumble to
pieces, the more completely will it destroy itself,
with heavy creakings, slow weakenings, and sudden
collapses. Thirteen nations are fighting against
one another, each convinced that its existence is at
stake. More than twenty-five millions of men are
under arms. Of these there have already fallen
more, and more wealth has been destroyed, than in
all the wars of history added together. This vast
cataclysm which is heaping up corpses, which is
delivering over whole countries to the most horrid
torments, which is arresting industry, paralysing the
arts and the sciences, imperilling agriculture, is not
only a complete disruption of all the ideas which
guided the administration of States, their military,
financial and diplomatic organizations — it is not
only the overthrow of the relations which subsisted
between governments, peoples, social classes and
political parties. This phenomenon is a profounder
one still. All the problems of religion, of law,
of morality, are being anew proposed. All the
spiritual elements upon which our civilization de-
pended are consuming themselves each day more
and more in the great furnace where a new synthesis
of humanity is being prepared."

So are to be explained prophecies wherein I
cannot help discovering a certain exaggeration.

Truly. I do not believe that, when the war is over,

216 THE WAY OF HONOUR

we will take up our existence at the point where
we left it. Each of us has only to recall how he
regarded his own country, Europe, the world, life
and his own duties in the month of July 1914, and
to compare what he thought then with what he
thinks to-day.

How many illusions have been shattered ! How
many of his conceptions have been dissipated !
How many sophisms have died !

" The war once at an end," writes Dr. Gustave
Le Bon, " we shall find ourselves confronted with
a social edifice which our political and religious dis-
sensions had already seriously shaken. One of the
most difficult changes will be to get rid of the
fatal power of words. With a few popular formulae
concerning progress, pacifism, socialism, universal
brotherhood, dangerous rhetoricians masked the
weight of those realities under which we were
doomed to go down."

It is probable that, after the war, the principal
will become more distinct from the accessory and
the essential from the formal ; that we will intro-
duce into our ideas and conduct more simplicity
and self-sacrifice and that experience will have
developed in each one of us, at the centre of his
conscience and his will, together with an interior
principle of obedience to duty, a clearer principle
of action without which the first is a vain thing.

It is possible also, as Ferrero believes, that we
shall better understand, after the war, all the mis-

SIGHTS AND LESSONS OF THE WAR 217

takes which the nineteenth century committed when
it sought for progress in the quantitative evolu-
tion of human values, and that civilization hence-
forth will assign to humanity a more simple and
elevated ideal, nearer to the eternal truth, instead
of dragging it, gasping, towards a production and
consumption perpetually more abundant, without
even imposing upon these abuses those limitations
which health, morality and beauty demand.

But we do not imagine, nevertheless, that we shall
be other men.

Those who had made or seen the Revolution
believed also quite sincerely that humanity was
transformed from top to bottom ; that the world
weary of turning to the right, was beginning its
journey over again backwards and that Provi-
dence, ripened by experience, had definitely changed
its laws.

No. Humanity has remained and will remain
itself, and in the man of to-morrow will reappear
the man of yesterday, the man of all time, the old
Adam, with the same passions, the same capacities
for good and evil, the same vices and the same virtues.

And we will see him come to life again with the
same astonishment that we feel when we see Nature
smile again after the storm.

Last week I was close to the battle-front, and the
sun was shining brilliantly. And I saw around
those ruined villages which the Battle of the Yser
has made famous ; in those fields where so much

2i8 THE WAY OF HONOUR

blood has flowed, where so many shells have fallen,
where so many of our little soldiers lie — I saw the
Spring taking up again its life-bearing work, and I
was amazed, as often before, to see how, in spite
of the violence and destructiveness of man, the
great calm and peaceful sky continues to lavish
upon us its same sunlight, its same flowers, and its
same sweet scents. And, thinking of the country
over there beyond the trenches, which was quite
close to me, and towards which my whole soul
yearned, I told myself that there too that which
has been undone is striving to recompose itself.

And so, when the whirlwind shall have passed by
and the rainbow shines over our devastated fields
and our ruined cities, Humanity will continue to
obey its essential laws.

Right will always be Right, and conscience always
conscience. The great truths will not have changed,
nor the great duties of life. And the forces of
Good and of Evil will resume their struggle. For
alongside of those souls which patriotism will have
beautified, those minds which will have been
rendered more healthy, those strengthened wills
which will appear as the continuation of the moral
splendours of to-day, and the payment for our
sacrifices, we must expect that there will also
remain something of the worse aspects of the war.
Kant, who knew his fellow-countrymen well, would
have it that war makes more evil spirits than good.
It is certain that human morality will for long

SIGHTS AND LESSONS OF THE WAR 219

remember the spectacle which has been afforded us
by the cynical violation of agreements on the part
of our enemies and by certain examples of cowardice
and selfishness which one or another of the neutral
countries has given. It will continue to suffer from
the licence which has been granted to the instincts
of violence, of cruelty and of rapine. There will
remain behind something, too much indeed, of that
confusion which establishes itself so readily, in time
of war, between the " mine " and the " thine,"
of the ease with which the debtor escapes his
obligations, of the laxity which is born of the dis-
persal of families, torn from their customs, their
occupations and their land.

But come what may, whether the morrow of the
war shows us the conflict of traditional forces or
brings to light a quite new order of morals and ideas,
the duty of those who associate care for their neigh-
bour with that of their own existence is to watch
those symptoms which declare themselves, to pene-
trate the mystery of the rebirth which is coming,
to utilize its energies and to guide its tendencies,
with their whole might, in the direction of the good,
the true and the beautiful.

Whether the moral revision of to-morrow be com-
plete or partial, whether we have to reconstruct or
simply to restore, it is no less certain that the first
effort of reform must be directed towards family life.

220 THE WAY OF HONOUR

For any one who knows history and knows from
his studies that the family is the principle of every
organization of human society, this is as clear as
crystal. Religion is the key-stone of the dome of
the social edifice, but the family is its corner-stone.
Lacking this, there can be no city. For the city
has not grown like a centre which, little by little,
has developed its sphere about it. The city is
nothing in its inception but an agglomeration of
small groups, not of individuals, but of families.
Without the family there can be no homeland, since
the homeland is the result of the union of cities for
their common defence.

It is also clear for any one who interrogates a
judge who is never mistaken — his conscience. The
inward monitor tells each of us plainly that in the
effort, each day renewed, whose end is the tomb,
there is no better fire for the lighting of our path
than the hearth, or a better argument for making
us accept the law of work, and the cares and com-
pulsions of life and the need of self-devotion, at the
same time, both to our own kindred and to our own
country.

Let us rather recall the day when we heard the
first cry of our first-born. On that day, did we
not understand that henceforth there was something
changed in our life ? Henceforth man is no longer
a wanderer upon the earth. He marches through
a new environment towards a defined goal.

In the activity of his career or the intoxication of

SIGHTS AND LESSONS OF THE WAR 221

his pleasures, he may chance perhaps to deviate
from the straight path. But let sorrow come, let
the storm break upon his head, and he will seek
about for some one to whom to attach himself.
And as the drowning man catches at straws, the
man whose heart is breaking shelters himself in
the weakest of arms, and finds again his courage
in the tender love of his own folk. He takes the
hand of his wife. He bends over his children.
And the strongest emotion which they can feel is
to see their father weep. Thus the family is con-
solidated. It finds in trials and in sorrows which
are often desolating the very secret of stability.
Though he himself should die, the father of a family
knows that the traces of his steps will not be lost
in the sand and that others will follow him upon
the same path :

Sa veuve et ses petits garderont sa mJtnoire,
La terre sera douce a cet enfant fidele.

It suffices to develop and extend this natural
sentiment and patriotism is born. For the family
affections have quickly demanded more room, the
expansion of the houses' walls, and the association
of kindred and neighbours with their thoughts and
their efforts. And what is the Fatherland — the land
of my fathers, says etymology — if not an enlarged
family ? What is the spirit of nationality, if not
the home extended as far as the frontiers ?

Will you encourage patriotism ? Proceed from

222 THE WAY OF HONOUR

the simple to the elaborate, from the nearest to the
less near. For it is folly to wish to impose, all at
once, upon the selfish heart of man the Human Race
in its entirety, and to hope that all at once he will
absorb the whole of which he is a part. The mouth-
ful is too big.

And it is because the same moral laws rule the
Fatherland and the family, of which the one is no
more than an abridgment of the other, that the
patriotic sentiments will, in their turn, attain to
their utmost intensity through trial and sacrifice.

In happy times the citizens of one and the same
nation live in contact rather than in harmony. In
order that they shall feel the same thrill, it is neces-
sary that danger should arise. But then they feel
themselves all at once united with those whom the
same soil has nurtured, to their living compatriots
and their dead and to their children yet to be born.
Sharing in the glory and the successes of the best,
they suffer at the hands of the foreigner, from the
failures of the others. They are ready to defend
the heritage of which the patient toil of their ancestors
has made them the heirs, or rather the trustees.

If the upheaval is terrific, as is that through which
we are passing, it is with a more ready step that
millions of men who have been divided hitherto by
the barriers of countless rivalries hasten to come
together. They look into one another's eyes.
They recognize one another. They stretch out
their hands. They experience I know not what

SIGHTS AND LESSONS OF THE WAR 223

wordless communion. They say to one another
" My brother ! "

Because you understand these primitive truths —
which Le Play has so admirably expressed — and
grasp them in all their bearings, you have already
resolved, in furtherance of the task begun by your
Congress in 1915, to study, as the work most essential
to the future, the defence and advancement of
French family life.

With what attention will your deliberations and
conclusions, whose authority the presence of so many
eminent men ensures, be observed and understood,
to give rise in their turn to new resolves and in
their turn to create fruitful works.

Dare I take advantage of my brief office, and of
the circumstances that I am a stranger among you, to
address to you not a piece of advice, but a prayer ?

You are about to study the French family. Do
not be too severe upon it, and say of it nothing bad.

While others boast themselves to be great ones
and exalt without measure their relative qualities,
there is a phenomenon equally common and even
ancient, and that is the tendency of French society
to calumniate itself. " Not only is it literature,
both romantic and theatrical, which rashly spreads
all over the world a deformed image of the French
family — the true features of which certain better
inspired masters, such as M. Rene Bazin and M.

224 THE WAY OF HONOUR

Henry Bordeaux, happily reconstitute and defend.
But — and you will pardon my frankness — there are
also at times moralists or reformers, whose intentions
are worthy of all possible praise, but whose vision
rather willingly discovers cause for grief ; and
these contribute to this misconception.

How superior is the French family to the opinion
which prevails with regard to it, without and perhaps
within the country ! And if it has afforded material
for some criticism, how fully has it raised itself
above it ! Believe the words of a foreigner who
imagined that he knew it and had loved it for long,
and who every day, finding it fairer far than the
opinion he had of it, is surprised and moved to the
depths of his being by the spectacle of virtue which
it affords — and so simply.

It was customary to praise it for its agreeable
and brilliant qualities ; to pay it tribute for a more
attentive care, more anxious than elsewhere, on
the part of the mother for her children, for her thrift
and moderation, but we hardly suspected its most
sterling merits : its earnestness and its unselfishness
in responding to duty's call, its forces of energy and
of sacrifice.

And see how to-day it is facing immense and pro-
longed exposure and suffering with a resolution
which never falters. Beside every hearth it is
cultivating the sublime flower of heroism. How
many fathers and mothers are there in this France
of whom, in spite of myself, I am thinking — so cruelly

SIGHTS AND LESSONS OF THE WAR 225

tortured, so courageous. Like the Fatherland itself,
the family stands erect, accepting the decisions of
its Government without hesitation, its sword and
its head held high, never allowing weariness to
overcome it nor the barbarian, who already can count
on nothing but such weariness, to daunt its vigorous
resolution.

And the women of France, with what dignity,
what warmth of charity, what a firm endurance
they support the valour of your soldiers and add
to the force of what they are accomplishing !

They called them a little frivolous. But see with
what propriety and tact they have associated, and
spontaneously, their existence with the stern realities
of war.

A few days ago I was in London. Posters, de-
signed to enlighten the civil population with regard
to the precise condition of affairs, had taken the
places on all the walls of the motley posters which
called volunteers to the defence of the Empire.
And I read, repeated to weariness, in letters two
feet high, this warning, which appeared to me to
have been understood and heeded already :

Extravagance in dress is unpatriotic.

To what Frenchwomen would one think of ad-
dressing such a lesson, save a few empty-headed
members of a world that is practically cosmopolitan,
and who would not understand it ?

The fact that the French family is so beautiful

15

226 THE WAY OF HONOUR

and possesses so many unsuspected resources is
no doubt one more reason for defending it better
against dangers which might threaten it and risks
which are often no more than the reverse of its
qualities themselves.

I do not minimize these dangers. They are
real enough. We find them, I fancy, in every
country, and one cannot be too earnest in combating
them. There is the insidious attack of obscenity,
through books, the theatre, the fashions, the poster,
the newspaper, the Neo-Malthusian propaganda —
through a thousand perverse devices which do not
even spare childhood. There is gambling, that
evil and corrupting influence, which kills all taste
for honest work and discredits decency more surely
than the sophisms of its worst enemies. There
is ignoble alcoholism, one other common enemy,
which extinguishes the man and inflames the brute,
indefatigable recruiting-sergeant for the prisons, the
hospitals, and the lunatic asylums, and which, not
content with reaching its own victims, poisons even
unto the future generations the very sources of life.
There is the rural exodus, which dissociates human
labour from the Eternal creative activity and, by
dragging the family away from the land, detaches
it from society and its laws.

As to the particular risks against which your
endeavours will seek to fortify this institution that
is so dear to us, am I wrong when I say that they
are at times only exaggerations of such and such
virtues which are less developed in other lands ;

SIGHTS AND LESSONS OF THE WAR 227

that the weakness of certain parents is only an
abuse of their tenderness ; that we must blame an
extreme care for domestic harmony, a familiarity
in which the paternal authority may become sub-
merged ; and that the limitation of births is often
no more than the false calculation of a shortsighted
prevision, jealous to husband revenue for which it
looks to unearned increment rather than to honest
labour ? You will remedy these mistakes, the
gravity of which, by the way, I do not seek in
the least degree to deny. Some you will remind
that all power which abdicates its authority ceases
to be obeyed. To others you will demonstrate
this truth which Montaigne formulates so concisely in
his own delicious language when he writes : " Where
life is hard, the abundance and the company of
children is a household asset/' They are so many
new tools and means of acquiring wealth. All
these problems will lead you to consider whether
there be not reforms to be introduced, if not into
the laws — I know too well how much is lacking in
the legislation of my own country to commit the
indiscretion of considering whether there exist gaps
or errors in yours — at least into the customs of your
land. These depend upon each one of us rather
than upon Parliaments. And to explain my thought
by an example, what, for many French families,
is the fear of having a child ? It is the fear of
having a daughter. And what is the fear of having
a daughter but the fear of having a dot to provide ?
A great result will be obtained on that day when

228 THE WAY OF HONOUR

parents — even those who have no daughters — shall
understand that the tastes, the likings, the natural
and social intimacies, the exchange of opinions and
beliefs, the qualities and the virtues are, as M. Henri
Lavedan says, " other dots just as precious as that
to which so much prudence offers sacrifices, which
thinks itself wise and is only blind."

Finally, you will only have to seek your inspira-
tion from the comforting spectacle of so many French
homes of to-day, and to show it to the world, in order
to make clear for all the type of those " directing "
families which the teaching of Le Play praises so
highly, and to raise up imitators of it. There is
nothing like example. " There is in example,"
said Madame Swetchine, " a power which surpasses
all others. And without thinking of it, one guides
others aright by walking straight oneself."

While we study these problems with the keen
desire to serve at once the family and the Fatherland,
our thoughts, without being distracted Irom their
proper work, will be — will they not ? — always with
those who, deafened by the din of shells and with
every faculty engaged upon winning the victory, are
working in this same cause

For it is the family, at the same time as the country,
that they are defending and that they are saving by
assuring the triumph of Right and Christian civiliza-
tion— the true stake in this formidable conflict.

It is only on that day when, in the knowledge of

SIGHTS AND LESSONS OF THE WAR 229

its error and with the avowal of its impotence,
there shall crumble into ruin that Kultur of pride
and falsehood which does not recognize right as
against force nor punishment for crime, that
the moral atmosphere of humanity will again
become breathable and nations, cities, families
and individuals will be able to resume, under a
clear sky, the laborious and useful course of their
destinies.

BOOKS AND THE WAR

A speech delivered at the General Assembly of the
Societe Bibliographique, at Paris, on the jth of
June IQI6.1

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, —

All the warmth of your reception and the welcome
which has been addressed to me by M. Geoff roy de
Grandmaison, whose friendship was for me a source
of pride before it became to-day a cause of embarrass-
ment, do not suffice to make it clear to me what
title I have to address such an audience as this.

1 M. Carton de Wiart presided : with him on the platform
were Mgr. Baudrillart, Rector of the Catholic Institute of
Paris ; M. Geoffroy de Grandmaison, president of the Societe
Bibliographique ; Baron Guillaume, Minister of Belgium ;
MM. Alexandre Celier, Prince Louis de Broglie, Baron
Angot des Rotours, Count Baguenault de Puchesse, the Abbe
Clement, Leon Cornudet, Count de Courson, Pierre de la
Gorce, of the French Academy, Count Christian de Kergolay,
de Lanzac de Laborie, Gabriel Martin, Canon Pisani, Count
de Richemont, Marius Sepet, Henri Tournouer, Members
of Council.

230 THE WAY OF HONOUR

But perhaps my very unworthiness may be offered
as my excuse. Coming among you as a non-expert,
I was about to say as a stranger, I shall be able,
without being handicapped by any scruples of
delicacy, to bring freely, to your Society and its
leaders, praise and congratulation which another who
was more closely concerned with its activities and
its progress might perhaps not be able to offer to it.

I salute then, with admiration and gratitude, as
one of the fairest flowers that have been brought
forth in the soil of science by the great sun of
devotion, the Societe Bibliographique, which during
nearly half a century has steadily grown in strength
and fruit fulness.

At your last general assembly, held two and a
half months before the outbreak of war — how far
away that date already seems, does it not ? — M.
Fernand Laudet told you in the clearest, brightest
and happiest possible fashion how much that is
solid, varied and useful is to be found in the work
which you day by day carry on. I shall not attempt,
even to confirm it, to speak of the judgment of such
a man So many and such weighty authorities have
for so long a period insisted upon the importance
and proclaimed the benefits of your popular publi-
cations, your Almanac, your circulating libraries,
and above all your marvellous PolyUUion, that no
word^ of mine could truly add anything to what
they have said. It should be enough if, in my
official capacity, I set the seal of authenticity upon
this mass of testimony.

SIGHTS AND LESSONS OF THE WAR 231

Among these authorities I cannot, however,
refrain from naming two who, since they are of
my own country, and to-day are both suffering
tribulation, are to me peculiarly dear. One is
the Compagnie des Bollandistes ; the other, the Societe
Scientifique of Brussels, to which your own Society
has been, and, I am sure, will continue to be, a kind
foster-mother. To mention them is to recall to
our minds the nameless and inexcusable trials which
many of the members, and among these the most
illustrious, have undergone and are at this moment,
when we are met here together, still suffering. It
is also, I know very well, to excite in your imagina-
tion, as in my own, the cruel contrast which exists
between the regime of liberty under which they
developed their strength and the methodical torture,
in which they have their share, of a nation which
is being scourged in its sons, its wealth, and its
monuments.

If I pause a moment upon this thought, do not
imagine that it is to make any complaint or to
register any regret ; for such things are very far
from the desire of those valiant hearts to which you
have been so good to-day as to offer your sympathy.

In his immortal poem Dante has written :

. . . Nessun maggior dolore
Che ricordarsi del tempo felice
Nella miseria. . . .

" I know no greater sorrow than to recall the
days of happiness when one is wretched/'

232 THE WAY OF HONOUR

But what may have seemed true to the great
Florentine victim of the discords of Italy and of
the ingratitude of his own fellow-citizens the ex-
perience of to-day denies to those who, in their
trials, feel themselves united so closely with all that
is honourable and intelligent in humanity. It is
not a sorrow for them to think of sacrifices to
which they have themselves deliberately consented.
On the contrary, they feel I know not how great
a pride when they tell themselves that they have
suffered for their country and for Justice ; I know
not what bitter pleasure in being able to oppose to
that unjust fate, which they are still called upon
for a time to endure, the calm resistance of a blame-
less conscience.

Though for the moment deprived of this loving
collaboration, as, at the same time, of the help of
so many men of science, learning and letters, who,
for the last two years, have been occupied with their
noble duty of soldiers, you have not been willing
that your work should thereby suffer interruption.
Those amongst you who have been able to do so
have done double work. Is it not also to serve
your country and our common cause to continue,
as you are doing, to spread the light in the darkness
which the storm has brought, and to sow, with
tireless hand, the seed of truth even upon the fields
that have been wasted ? Is it not of value to pursue
without interruption your task of strengthening
the public morals and your work of honest pub-
licity, to which the Latin motto so well applies :

SIGHTS AND LESSONS OF THE WAR 233

" Ingenia hominum rempiiblicam faciunt " ? And is
it not, finally, a great public interest which you
serve by never ceasing to advance and do honour
to the French tongue, that tongue " which " as
Veuillot said, "is so bad a vehicle for falsehood,"
and which has, on the contrary, been the best
vehicle of Christian civilization throughout the ages ?

But the very usefulness and worth of these efforts,
which are continuing your activities of yesterday
and assuring their further continuance, can only suffer
by comparison with what you have done in the
war. Your foresight has understood, your generosity
and your ingenious labours have admirably realized,
how much common usefulness there can be between
those two diametrically opposed things wherein the
genius of Victor Hugo delighted — war and books.

At the first glance one sees how opposed to one
another these two things are. In all wars, and
particularly in this one, books have suffered as have
men. Schoolmasters still rightly hold up to the
detestation of youth the name of the Caliph Omar,
who, in the year 640, destroyed the Library of Alex-
andria. For having, in a little pocket-book of
personal notes, which was found upon him, made
one simple comparison between that event and the
burning of Lou vain University, which he had just
witnessed, a young and learned Jesuit, Father
Dupierreux was shot, in August 1914, by the apostles
of Kultur. But Kultur will pass and, to the eternal
shame of Kultur, the words of Father Dupierreux
will remain.

234 THE WAY OF HONOUR

But our enemies are not content with destroying
books. They make them, after their own fashion.
And they make many. What has been the part
played in war by the learned men of Germany ever
since the days of Frederick II ? They have mounted
guard around the throne of the Hohenzollerns.

Perceiving that, by violating the neutrality of
Belgium, which he had solemnly sworn to protect,
their Kaiser had after all gone too far, the agents
and sub-agents of the German propaganda are now
exhausting themselves, in the most pedantic way,
to efface the effect of the admissions of Herr von
Bethmann-Hollweg and Herr von Jagow, and to
make the world believe that Belgium, before the
delivery of the German ultimatum, had failed in
her duty to that neutrality. As for the " atrocities,"
those to which Germany has, much against her will,
been forced to resign herself, they were made neces-
sary by the crimes of our population !

All these sophistries and falsehoods are set forth
in those superficial articles or thick volumes which
are appearing every day in German or in badly
executed translations. How many times, when I
have been reading them in the original, have I said
to myself that one would in vain attempt to re-
produce, in the clear and loyal tongue of France,
these heavy and pedantic productions, which con-
found Justice with Violence, and which excuse all
crimes by the advantage which a nation may find,
or believe that she finds, in committing them. Even
as there is a French beauty, which is characterized

SIGHTS AND LESSONS OF THE WAR 235

by I know not what liveliness and good sense, and
by that indefinable quality in which all the others
are expressed — I mean, good taste — so there is a
certain French truthfulness which is nothing but
simplicity and clearness, justice and precision. The
French tongue has been for long centuries at the
service of this beauty and this truth. Never will
it be persuaded to describe as " scraps of paper "
compacts of the most sacred kind in which nations
engage their word and their honour. Never could
it have been guilty of those clumsy and vulgar
denials which we find in the " Manifesto of the
Intellectuals." And in the universal controversy
of which this war is the subject, as in the methods
of fighting adopted by the one side and the other,
everywhere, every moment, the contrast is made
clear between the living, loyal and free flame of the
French genius and the thick, stifling fog of a heavy
and enslaved national culture.

Assuredly we may look for much from this con-
trast, which is by no means escaping the attention
of the neutral countries. Assuredly we are strangely
assisted by the stupidity of our adversaries. Thus,
at the same time, they accuse the Belgians of having,
before the war, thrown in their fortunes with those
of the Triple Entente, and spread abroad every-
where, in an attempt to stir up trouble between us
and our great Allies and friends of to-day, extracts
from certain diplomatic papers which prove to
demonstration the contrary of what they say. And
so much clumsiness in intrigue makes one think

236 THE WAY OF HONOUR

of what Pascal said : " How advantageous it is to
have to do with people who at the same time use
both sides of an argument ! One needs nothing but
themselves to confound them with."

Nevertheless, we must not leave the field open to
them ; we must be always on our guard against
their dodges, and here, as elsewhere, we must be
bold to take the offensive at every opportunity.
It is a duty for every man who knows how to handle
words or a pen, and is blessed with a certain amount
of leisure and with any means of making himself
heard in neutral countries, to spread the truth
amongst them, to explain the causes of our conduct
and our confidence, to expose the slanders by which
German propaganda seeks now to rob us even of
our honour. In this most seasonable work the
Committee of Catholic Propaganda, of which Mgr.
Baudrillart is the President, has veritably excelled.
You have assisted it in its eff orts, and thus have
contributed to the force of a movement the precious
effects of which I have had many occasions to remark.

It is also your true perception of the objects of
propaganda, as well as a very natural sympathy,
which has led you to interest yourselves in the fate
of the schools in Alsace, to which so many memories
attach you and wherein ultimately your hopes will
materialize.

But that which ought to dominate, and does in
fact dominate, all your work in the war, is your care
for the soldier. There is no day in which you do
not place in his hands, by sea or by land, those good

SIGHTS AND LESSONS OF THE WAR 237

companions and those cheerful tonics, good books,
companions which he may find again whenever he
will — in the trenches, in his bivouac, in his barracks
or in hospital.

The chaplains, ours and yours alike, have quickly
formed the habit of applying to you. They know
that at the head of the Societe Bibliographique a
fortunate coincidence has placed the learned and
warm-hearted man who was the principal organizer
of the French Military Chaplains in this war.

On the evening when the illustrious Albert de Mun
— and permit me in passing to salute the memory
of that great Frenchman and great Christian, towards
whom the legislation and the social causes of my
country owe an imperishable debt of gratitude — on
the evening when de Mun, whose was the merit
first to light the torch, was compelled to lay
it down, M. de Grandmaison received it from his
failing hands, and you know with what care he has
cherished it and developed its flame.

Since I have been guilty, with an indiscretion
for which I offer no excuses, of helping to swell yet
further the clientele of the Societe Bibliographique ;
since I have often, and always with success, sent to
it chaplains, officers, and soldiers of our Army,
wounded, sick, prisoners — all so far from their families
and their homes— it is my duty to bring to-day to
this organization, its President, its committee and
its subscribers, whole sheaves of thanks, the weight
of which has begun to bow me down, and which
to-day's meeting gives me an opportunity, ladies

238 THE WAY OF HONOUR

and gentlemen, of laying at your feet. What good
you have done to so many soldiers' souls and hearts !
And, by elevating them, by instructing them, or
simply by entertaining them, how better fitted you
have made them to understand, to accept and to
desire those great events in the mid1 1 of which they
live and die !

One of my friends whom I surprised one day in
his dugout, seated beside a bomb-thrower, had a
book in his hand. He greeted me by the astonishing
question, " Have you read Baruch ? He was a
great genius." And showing me a few pages of
that prophet, who was the companion of the
moment, he emphasized for me certain truths
whose modern application, I admit, seemed to
me to be astoni hing, and particularly one passage
about the famous giants of great stature and skilful
in war. "It is not they," it is written, " whom
God has chosen, and He has not taught them the
way of wisdom. And they have perished because
they had not the true wisdom, they have perished
because of their folly."

Another time, I found in a trench an officer — a
Frenchman — reading the Discours sur la Methode ;
and I remembered then that organization, no more
than so many other qualities of which they boast
so loudly, is not the invention of our enemies.

While you spread the knowledge of the best books
of yesterday, you do not forget those of to-day,
which provide us with so many remarkable philo-
sophic, political and economic commentaries upon

SIGHTS AND LESSONS OF THE WAR 239

the war, so many impressionist accounts, and above
all so many admirable letters from soldiers. You
think also of the books of to-morrow. What these
are to be, certain far-sighted critics, and particularly
M. Henri Joly and M. Andre Beaunier, appear to
me to have announced with a very great degree of
certainty. They believe that our young men who
will come back from the front, and who will have
pondered over their sufferings, will forget neither
those sufferings nor their meditations. For them
sentiments and ideas will have acquired a new
motion and phrases a new rhythm. These critics
foresee that action, by opening for French letters a
spring of initiative, of courage and of heroism, will
open also a fountain of eloquence and poetry,
wherein realism and idealism will both share equally,
We all know, in the old historic homes and above
all in our provinces and our country-sides, one or
another of those old libraries, well stocked and often
dusty, which seem as expressive as the fine faces
of certain old men wherein a whole lifetime is re-
flected. Each generation has contributed to the
store by filling some of the shelves. The Great
Century is represented by its own majestic classics
and the eighteenth by its little battalions of
volumes, with their tooled and gilded bindings,
dapper, gay, and bold as companies of musketeers.
Voltaire, Rousseau, La Harpe, who occupy a good
deal of space, make as it were a frontier between
two regimes. Here stand Chateaubriand and Ben-
jamin Constant and Stael, who seem like the

240 THE WAY OF HONOUR

advance guard of a new era. On their heels
comes crowding in disorder the throng of the
romanticists ; and grave philosophers and wise
historians find themselves with surprise the neigh-
bours of the captains of imaginative literature and
the masters of artistic writing. Nearer to our-
selves, Taine and Brunetiere, to say nothing of the
great men who are still alive, are no doubt quite
ready to stand a little more closely together in order
to welcome the books of to-morrow, wherein already
they anticipate the confirmation of their own teaching
and aspirations.

On the shelves which are still empty, or those
which may become so owing to the emigration to
the Allies of the books which will fall out of fashion,
what are those new books which we or our children
shall arrange ? Will these recruits mark a return
to classicism ? WTill they have retained something
of that interpenetration which is every day be-
coming more intimate between the mentalities of the
countries of the Grand Alliance ? In the domain
of science, shall we find an accentuation or a loss
of that doubtfully valuable specialization which,
when it is too precocious, drains down into
valleys perhaps more profound but assuredly more
narrow, so many intellectual forces, at the risk of
drying up the highest plateaux of human thought ?

Who lives, will see.

Meanwhile, the impartial collector makes note of
the diplomatic books which follow one another and
reply to one another : the blue books, the green

SIGHTS AND LESSONS OF THE WAR 241

books, the grey books, the orange books — even
those white bookb whose colour of innocence has
been selected — who could expect otherwise ? — by the
Power of falsehood and crime.

There is also another book which is to come, and
whose preparation is never at a standstill. This
book will bring everything to a focus, and its interest
will dominate that of all the rest. This is the ter-
rible and consolatory book wherein all the heroisms
and the cowardices, the moral beauties and squalors,
the glories and the vengeances shall have their own
pages. It is the Book of Judgment :

Liber scriptus proferetur
In quo totum continetur
Unde mundus judicetur,

and the triplet that follows adds :
Nil inultum remanebit.

No action can remain without recompense or
punishment, neither the good, nor the best, nor the
worst.

And we rely upon this, do we not ?

SOLDIER POETS1

THE Spirit bloweth where it listeth. How should
we be surprised that it has made fruitful our
trenches beside the Yser and that we behold there

1 Introduction to a Collection of Poems from the Front,
by certain Belgian Officers and Soldiers (Paris, Jouve et Cie).

16

242 THE WAY OF HONOUR

the flowers of Poetry blossoming among the harvest
of Heroism ?

Here is a whole sheaf of these flowers of the
trenches. Its beauty is moving and its perfume is
a new one.

Those who bring it to us are young men for whom
Action, however rough and brutal it may be, has
not ceased to be the sister of Vision. At that tragic
moment when there went up the anguished cry of
our violated homeland, the greater part of them,
occupied with their studies or their pleasures, hardly
knew life save under its peaceful and happy aspects.
Some of them had already made a name for them-
selves in the literary revues. Others were still
almost children.

Since then all of them have been living the epic
of that Belgian Nation which entered into the war
out of neither self-interest nor hate, but for Honour
— simply. Like scattered seed they have — soon it
will be for three years — been carried away in the
vortex of this frightful and pathetic hurricane, which
can only be stilled when, with their own destinies,
the future of the whole human race shall have been
made safe.

All of them to-day have learned the business of
war — not that adventurous romance, all dash and
glitter, which no doubt they supposed it to be when
they were at school, but the austere and exhausting
lot of the Belgian soldier, with all that is comprised
therein of physical privation and mental suffering.
They feel that wound which has been opened in

SIGHTS AND LESSONS OF THE WAR 243

their hearts by their being torn from the beings and
the things which they loved, filled to overflowing
with a burning hate for the most detestable of
enemies. They know the brutalizing march through
dust and mud, the uncertainty of food and shelter.
They know the drama of the fight, where one escapes
from death by a handsbreadth, and, still more ex-
hausting than this drama, the long waits by day
and by night in the front trenches, under the freezing
rain and the whistling shells.

Le petit jour jaundtre et mou
Comme une eau lourde entre les sables
Les trouve assis, meconnais sables,
Une quinzaine dans un trou.

As one reads this little book one divines that most
of the poems which make it up were born during
long meditations on outpost duty or in the trenches.
While over his head the hours follow one another,
brightening or darkening by the play of light and
shade all the sadness and the ruin of the Flemish
landscape, how shall the young soldier, let him be
never so attentive to his duty, fail to collect, within
his subconscious soul, visions and impressions which
soon, if he has been stamped with the divine seal
of Art, shall blossom forth into works of poetry, of
music or of painting ? Is not this silent landscape
all filled with uncertainty and with hope ? Is he
not aware in it of the shudder of mystery and the
sigh of death ? Far away from these desolate plains,
over there beyond those floods with their cold
reflections of steel, there lies the promised land

244 THE WAY OF HONOUR

there is home, there is the face that he
adores. . <, .

Le foyer, le secret des vieilles habitudes,

La ville ou le village ou le temps les riva,

Les voisins, les amis, la chere quietude,

Les maisons, les jardins qu'en vain on cultiva,

Et ce qui semblait doux, et ce qui semblait rude !

And when the relief arrives to tear him from his
dreams they continue for the young soldier, even
unconsciously, to spin their thread. Poetic in-
spiration— for it is nothing less — accompanies him
in his march to the rear, and soon he hears the
rhythm which responds, more and more clearly, to
the beat of his own footsteps. I see this young
soldier, back in camp, with his haversack barely cast
off, hastening to note down the emotions and the
memories which he hears rising, each moment more
distinctly, from the depths of his soul wherein they
have germinated. His fingers are still numb with
the cold. His comrades are beside him, talking
loudly or calling to him. No matter ! See how he
takes from beneath his tunic, still wet with the rain
or the fog, a little notebook, jealously and tenderly
guarded. According to the temperament which is
his, he wishes here to express, seriously or gaily,
in an heroic or a familiar strain, the thoughts and
images which he has conceived during his tete-a-tete
with duty and danger. Lacking masters and books,
his technique, which at times fails for want of ex-
perience, endeavours to discover forms of expression
worthy to clothe the creations of his vigils and his

SIGHTS AND LESSONS OF THE WAR 245

valiance. Isolated momentarily from everything
that surrounds him, carelesr even of the risks to
which he never ceases to be exposed, see him, apart
from everything, save his work. . . . Has any
inspiration ever more surely justified the name of
" the sacred fire " ? What is poetry, what is lyricism,
if it be not the gift of transposing realities on to a
higher plane and of expressing their quintessence ?
" But here," says Jean Richepin, " onto what higher
plane do you hope to transpose this reality ? What-
soever you may do, whatsoever verses you may
create or imagine, how great soever be the treasure
of words which you have in your head wherewith
to clothe your ideas, the ideas and the events which
it is yours to translate must ever remain above you
and beyond your reach." Ah 1 what a noble phalanx
of youth — and each day it grows—- this war will
add to the ranks already thinned, of all those
who, accompanying their songs with the French or
the Belgian lyre, have wrought to endow Belgium
with a national literature. And how happy and
proud I am to present to the cultured people of
Belgium and elsewhere a few of the best of these
soldier-poets !

Soldier-poets. The thing is less novel in Belgium
than we imagine. One of the foremost troubadours
of his time was that valiant Quenes de Bethune
who accompanied Baldwin of Hainault to the Fourth
Crusade and who died Lord of Adrianople. In the
time of our great Dukes of the West, Jacques de
Lalaing, who was known as " the good Flemish

246 THE WAY OF HONOUR

knight/' composed many delicious pastorals which
make him the disciple of Theocritus and a fore-
runner of Racan. Is it necessary to mention that
great captain of the eighteenth century, who was
at the same time one of the most brilliant of its
men of letters — Marshal the Prince de Ligne ; and
that heroic French comedian Jenneval, who, after
having composed the words of our Braban£onne, fell
singing them in the face of the enemy ?

In all the countries of the Entente, the thousand
vicissitudes of the Great War of to-day are forging
the links of brotherhood between the poet and the
soldier. In Italy, Gabriele d'Annunzio has learned
nobly to unite those two names. In the British
Army, it is a Rupert Brooke, the foremost poet of the
last generation, who enlisted during the first days
of the war and went to his death, like a new Byron,
upon the shores of the Orient. It is of him that
our own dear Verhaeren speaks in his Ailes rouges
de la Guerre :

Le jour qu'il eut compris que les hautes idies
Devenaient pen d peu

L'enjeu

De la lutte vers le futur e"chafaudee,
Etant poete, il se promit d'etre soldat.

In America it is the charming Alan Seeger. For-
merly a member of Harvard University, he enlisted
in the Foreign Legion. He was killed, one fine day
last summer, at Belloy-en-Santerre. But certain
of his verses, particularly Champagne, are already
immortal :

SIGHTS AND LESSONS OF THE WAR 247

Buvez / . . . Dans le vin d'or ou passe un reflet rose
Laissez plus longuement vos levres se poser,
En pensant qu'ils sont morts ou la grappe est eclose . . .
Et ce sera pour eux comme un pieux baiser.

In the French Army . . . but here they are legion,
from the glorious victims of the early fighting, such
as Charles Peguy —

Heureux ceux qui sont morts dans une juste guerre,
Heureux les epis murs et les bles moissonnes —

down to those who are still with us, and who have
lately produced some very fine work ; such as
Frangois Porche :

C'est une France peu connue,
Apre et profonde, austere et nue,
Pareille au sol noir des guerets ;
Son cceur que I'emphase incommode
PrJfere au ton pompeux de I' ode
L'ardeur des sentiments secrets.

And there, perfectly defined in these few lines,
are the special qualities which, without question,
will mark the contribution of the Great War to the
lyrical wealth of our respective countries : more
care, more truth. The new source whence our
soldiers draw their inspiration is at once deeper
and purer than the ambrosial fountains dear to the
Muses in the days before the war.

All our national life is to-day dominated by a
sentiment which is not without a sort of serene
splendour. This sentiment, which a whole country and
a whole army have instinctively obeyed, surrounds
itself, in fact, with a veil of reserve and modesty.

It bears a beautiful name — Honour — " a name,"

248 THE WAY OF HONOUR

says Alfred de Vigny, that other soldier-poet, " which
one cannot pronounce without growing serious,
because at this name he feels something stir in him
which is a part of his soul."

This sentiment, which mounts to any sacrifice,
has in it something too intimate and too simple
for it to accommodate itself to large conventional
gestures and magnificent attitudes. On the other
hand, the national life and the national work which
has drawn its inspiration therefrom during the past
three years will discover without doubt some happy
audacities. When the storm has calmed down, all
those grains \vhich to-day are delivered over to the
flail of war, and which are flying about through
strange skies, will find again their birthplace. There
they shall germinate in furrows whose fecundity the
ashes of our heroes and our homes will have still further
enriched. How shall a new art not hence arise ? This
new art, conceived in the noblest movements of the
human soul, who does not already perceive the serene
and true beauty which will characterize it ? This
art will be far removed from that of a Baudelaire
and a Catulle Mendes, which kept school among us
about 1880. It will have about it nothing mere-
tricious, highly flavoured, or of impure alloy. It will
be deeply human, with less of a literary flavour,
perhaps, but with more grip.

I believe too that, unlike our poetry of before
the war — which in general had remained faithful to
the formulae of the Parnassians and the Symbolists
— this new art will be popular. The visions and the

SIGHTS AND LESSONS OF THE WAR 249

emotions which it will evoke will have been, very
nearly, those of our " jas " and our " piottes," who
to-morrow are to be< ome once more our peasants
and our workmen. They read but little, I am told.
They will read more, when it will be a question, for
themselves and their children, of living again through
their meditations, their exploits and their suffering
of war-time. In any case the rising generation of
poets will be nearer to the people, because it will
have known them better and will thus remain more
sensitive to the instincts of justice and kindness.

Poets and soldiers, all these Belgian youth of
Honour and of Sacrifice, will learn their lesson at
the same time in the school of the purest Idealism
and that of the starkest Realism. What trans-
figured faces and what beautified souls will they
bring back to the dear land which awaits them !
With what new virtues and energies will they enrich
our race when we set about rebuilding our house !
I see again, with Maurice Maeterlinck, " our towns,
models of a true and pure family life, dwelling-places
of loyal and conscientious activity, of cordial and
smiling good-nature, of straightforward welcome, of
hands always stretched out, of hearts always open."
I see again the spectacle of our fields, our plains, our
valleys and our woods. But above all I see, con-
fronting this landscape which we will find desolated
and tragic, a new youth, tempered by its sufferings
and matured by its meditations. Like the beautiful
youth that Victor Rousseau has carved in marble,
his shoulders thrown back and his resolute head held

250 THE WAY OF HONOUR

high, it looks life henceforward in the face, without
timidity, yet without insolence or braggadocio, but also
fearlessly and with the noble consciousness of a duty
accomplished and a hope that cannot be destroyed.

FAREWELL TO EMILE VERHAEREN

A speech delivered at the funeral of Emile Verhaeren,
on the ist of December 1916, in the Place de
l'Hotel-de-Ville at Rouen.

A TRAIN that is to go by night. Travellers who
are in a hurry. One of them stumbles and falls
between two coaches. . . . They take him out. They
pick him up, all broken and bloody. ... It is Emile
Verhaeren. And his last expiring breath speaks these
words, " I am dying. My wife ! My country ! "

Your country ! It is, in her name, oh ! greatest
of our poets, that I come to be present at your burial ;
and the friendship, penetrated with respect, which
I felt for you when you lived, grows timid and hesi-
tates before the public duty which has been laid
upon me of saluting your entrance into immortality.

Your country ! She wore you like an ornament,
as you rejoiced in your pride in her. Thirty years
and longer you sang her praises. And your un-
ceasing voice, bitter and tender, fierce and fervent,
heard at first with surprise by a few in the intimacy
of literary circles, ended, each year more and more
broad and sonorous, by being heard by multitudes,
at the farthest ends of roads and seas.

Your country ! She lives in all your work.

SIGHTS AND LESSONS OF THE WAR 251

It is Flanders the mystical and it is Flanders the
sensual.

It is the time of Van Eyck and it is the school
of Rubens

It is the tumultuous past when

Mettant leur vie aux ordres de la mort
Pour driger, par blocs de volonte, leur sort,

our communes and our crafts, our belfries and
our cathedrals, prepared bit by bit our national
unity, by developing, from generation to genera-
tion, the love of liberty and respect for justice, by
strengthening, from century to century, the will to
live together, to fight together, and to die together.
None — save perhaps Camille Lemonnier — was more
profoundly conscious than wrere you of the equation
of all his being and this varied land, cut through
by the Scheldt and the Meuse and climbing so
pleasantly from the sands of the North Sea to the
plains of Flanders, the green hills of Brabant, and
lastly to the rocky glens and tablelands of Ardenne.
Over this fertile land hovered, as above a humming
hive, the incessant rumour of toil. Some more
thoughtful, others more ardent, all the labourers in
this common task — workers in flax and in the golden
grain, red workers in iron, black workers in coal,
whose faces and attitudes were the joy of Constantin
Meunier, you understood them and you translated
their effort, and your powerful song was as it were
measured by the rhythm of their scythes and their
shuttles, their hammers and their picks.

252 THE WAY OF HONOUR

Later, the imagination of Emile Verhaeren passes
beyond all frontiers. It takes all Humanity for its
bride. It summons all its forces, to laugh with
all joy and weep with all suffering :

O sainte vision des mis&res humaines,
Avec quelle angoissante et pathttique ardeur,
Comme on 6tend les plis retombants d'un suaire
Je vous ai descendus 4 I'entour de mon cceur I

Very far from reality and everyday life, his lyric
power carries him into every region of history or
fable. But though his thoughts march naked or
veiled in symbols, it is always the homeland that
those who know find again in his poems, and the
characteristics ot his art reveal perpetually, with a
brilliance that at times becomes violence, the son
of Flanders.

And as if such proofs of loyalty were not enough
for him, as if he wished that his work should be
dominated and crowned by a more direct testimony
to his love for his country, Verhaeren undertakes,
in the full maturity of his genius, that monumental
pentalogy which, celebrating in turn Les Tendr esses
premieres, La Guirlande des Dunes, Les Villes d
Pignons, Les Heros et les Plaines, exalts under her
many aspects, all equally dear, Tonte la Flandre. It
is for this especially that Belgium will be grateful
to him. In the famous group of Young Belgium,
which sprang from the schools of Ghent and Louvain
University, and which was guided at first by an
ideal and a motto purely aesthetic, Verhaeren was
one of those who most largely contributed to create

SIGHTS AND LESSONS OF THE WAR 253

a national inspiration and a national will. And
how can I refrain from recalling here what an in-
fluence was exerted upon this fortunate evolution
— which was to consolidate and cast glory upon the
Fatherland — by a spirit as far-sighted as it was
bold and whose teaching I, like Verhaeren, had
the honour long to enjoy : my dear master, Edmond
Picard, who is still in Belgium ?

But the gratitude of his country has found, in
her very misfortunes, a new and still more decisive
reason for honouring the poet. Suddenly, brutally
threatened, assailed in cowardly fashion, Belgium
was cast into a furnace of suffering and glory. Up
till then Verhaeren had not known what hate was.
With the whole of his tenacious idealism he had
believed in humanity. All men and all nations were
his friends If he loved and honoured with all his
fervent heart France — the bright France, as he is
fond of calling her — he had also given a place to
Germany in his respect and admiration. Intellectual
Germany had shown herself more than attentive to
his work. How could the poet, burning for glory,
remain insensible to such intoxicating homage ?

One hour ended everything. Germany assassinated
his mother.

Pas un instant, il n'hesita
A dominer en lui la dangereuse joie
D'etre juste et clement d la race de proie
Qui se prouvait cruelle avec tranquillite ;
Son cerveau libre en fut d tel point revolts

Qu'il fit accueil, porte ouverte,
A la haine innombrable, exaltante et alerte.

254 THE WAY OF HONOUR

In the ears of which of us does not the sound
ring, and in whose soul does not the shudder still
endure, of that book of yesterday which he wrought
out of panting, broken words : Les Ailes rouges de
la Guerre, dedicated to his Flemish compatriot, his
brother in genius and in glory, Maurice Maeterlinck ?
Who has not thrilled to the accents of Ceux, de
Liege, to his tragic lament for Ypres in flames, to
his fierce imprecations against that Power of Dark-
ness, Germany, " maker of twilight " :

Tu as voulu tuer dans I'homme I'etre humain

Qu'un Dieu presque tremblant avait fait de ses mains

Pour qu'il fut I'ornement et la clarte du monde.

Who has not felt, who does not still feel, the thrill
and the comfort of his hymns to Belgium, to France,
to Russia and to their valorous soldiers ?

The noble wife whom Verhaeren, at the moment
of his death, associated with his country — as he had
associated her with the immortality of his works in
his Heures claires and his Heures d'Apres-midi — she
who was the whole joy of his home, has expressed
the wish that the great poet should lie in Belgian
soil. In Belgian soil, in the Belgium that is free
to-day.

Ce n'est qu'un bout de sol dans I'infini du monde
Le Nord

Y de'chaine le vent qui mord.
Ce n'est qu'un peu de terre avec sa mer au bord
Et le ddroulement de sa dune infeconde.

Ce n'est qu'un bout de sol etroit
Mais qui renferme encore et sa reine et son roi,
Et I' amour condense d'un peuple qui les aime.

SIGHTS AND LESSONS OF THE WAR 255

It is there that he is to lie side by side with our
soldiers who have fallen in Honour's cause.

While we wait for the dawn of Victory, he will
not cease there to fight with us and for us — with
you and for you also, our brothers of France, whom
he loved so well and who to-day render him, in the
presence of these official authorities and this deeply
stirred throng, a homage which draws still closer
between us bonds which can never perish.

And nothing will survive of this fleshly tabernacle
of Verhaeren, embraced now and reabsorbed by the
clay of his Fatherland ; but the results of his genius
and his effort, caught up in the universal web of
things, will still continue to make fairer and more
strong the armour of our hopes and our wills.

In a preface which he wrote but the other day,
with his customary generosity, for the book of a
young Belgian author and soldier, Verhaeren said
this :

" The Homeland, which is nothing, through history,
but the tendency to union of an immense human
group, is constituted by the dead much more than
by the living. The latter, thanks to the conflict of
their interests, thanks to the clash of their egoisms,
are guilty of putting this tendency to union into
constant peril. At certain periods of profound
peace, these rivalries are not very dangerous, often
indeed they are useful and fruitful : the future calls
for them.

" But after the cataclysm which we are witness-
ing, they would be fatal and criminal. The country,

256 THE WAY OF HONOUR

in order to make herself anew, demands that each
of us shall have but one and the same goal, just as
a factory requires that each lump of coal which is
thrown into its furnaces shall serve but the one
motive power. The factory cares not what
colour their flame may be, nor of what degree the
heat may be which they give out. It knows that
each does its service, and it is from the combined
fire that it asks for heat and strength.

" The necessity for mutual effort must then post-
pone or at least adjourn all disputes. We must
increase our mutual confidence and we must under-
stand one another indulgently. Hands which would
never have met must stretch out to one another.
We must seek to cultivate not our differences
but our resemblances."

We shall remain obedient, greatest of our poets, to
the counsels of your wisdom, as we shall be careful
of your glory. In the new-born land of to-morrow,
as for the crucified nation of to-day, your glorious
works shall never cease to shine upon the horizon
of our souls like a bright fire that is the symbol of
concord, of beauty and of fidelity to the Homeland.

Printed in Gr.ai Briic.in by
fc'NWIN BROTHERS, LJMITKD, THE CiRESHAM PKESS, WOKIXG AND LONDON

PLEASE DQ NOT REMOVE
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615 The way of honour

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